#fucking love biblical symbolism

[heavenlymorals]

Biblical References in Both RDR games.

I love biblical references so much. When it comes to literature, it's probably my favorite type of symbolism. Like I genuinely get so happy when I connect things to the Bible which is what I'm going to do right now 😊😊 I also like the way that religion is incorporated into RDR as a whole, including the main characters' reaction to it.

So yup, here are just a few references or connections that I was able to make in no particular order.

Also, some of these are complete reaches and I'm aware of that, but fuck it, it's my blog and I do what I want 💪🏼

- The character and tragedy of Issac. In the Bible, Issac is the child of Abraham who is asked to be sacrificed by God by his father as a test of faith. God eventually intervenes to save Issac because he only wanted to test Abraham's faith. Dutch is shown as a God-like figure to the gang, as their devotion is to him. Arthur, indirectly, sacrifices Issac by not being there and by following what Dutch wanted. Arthur, Issac, and Dutch are parallels to Abraham, Issac, and God.

- Leviticus is the book that comes after the book of Exodus. After the gang's escape or exodus from Blackwater after the Blackwater massacre, they are met by Leviticus Cornwall, who becomes the next obstacle for the gang. After the gang's exodus, they get in trouble with Leviticus.

- The image of the deer and a mountain. Psalm 18:32-34 in the Bible says, "It is God who arms me with strength, and makes my way blameless? He makes my feet like deers' feet, and sets me upon my high places." In Arthur's condemnation of Dutch, Micah, and their evil, he becomes steady in his identity and beliefs, like a deer's feet on a mountain, which is where he dies in the end. W symbolism.

- The mission "Sodom? Back to Gomorrah." In the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities that were so morally depraved and evil that God decided to destroy the both of them, saying that if there was even one good person in those cities, he'd spare them, but there weren't. In those missions, you also do two evil acts, going from one and then BACK to the other. You rob the bank and then go BACK to collect the debt from Edith Downes. So you finish one evil deed and to straight to the next. This can also show how morally bankrupt Arthur's apathy made him at this point in the game.

- Micah's guns say "Vengeance is hereby mine." This could be a reference to Roman's 12:19 "vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord." Micah's violent nature makes him take his anger out on the world.

- "Your father is seduced by him with the forked tongue. It's no use hoping." The blind prophet to Arthur. Pretty straight forward symbolism, it's a nod to the snake that seduced Eve, just like how Micah manipulates Dutch.

- Dutch walking away from Arthur when he dies and though he realizes his wrong doing and feels shame, his pride forbids him from apologizing or saying he was wrong. This can be a parallel to how Adam and Eve run away from God when they feel shame over believing in the snake, but their pride won't allow them to apologize to God, hence damning them like how Micah damned Dutch.

- There were twelve ACTIVE gang members before the Blackwater massacre. When I mean active, I mean gang members who are canonically consistent (so not uncle, Swanson, Strauss, or the girls) on going on jobs for the gang. Micah, Bill, Javier, John, Hosea, Arthur, Charles, Sean, Lenny, Josiah, Mac and Davey Callender. Christ had 12 disciples and Dutch is portrayed as a savior to the gang, or a Christ like figure. And would you look at that, there is a traitor in both groups of twelve (Micah and Judas).

- Both John and Arthur's graves have scripture from Jesus's sermon on the mountain (Matthew 5:1-12). John's is blessed are the peacemakers and Arthur's is blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

- The go back for the money ending. If you go back for the money and have low honor, you'll see that the camp is engulfed in flames as you try to get the money. The fight with Micah is brutal and you die faced down in the dark. This death is an allegory for going to either hell and purgatory as you choose a final evil act of leaving your brother to possibly die just so you can get money as an act of revenge. If you have high honor, you are still surrounded by flames, but you still have a chance at heaven given that you die facing up seeing the light one final time.

- The help John ending has similar connotations. If you have low honor, you die by gunshot and are shrouded in darkness, which can symbolize the absence of God's light and how Arthur's final act couldn't absolve the lack of guilt he feels for the rest of the actions that he KNOWS are evil (click here for a my interpretation of Arthur's morality). In high honor, though, you get to crawl to the mountain side and see the rising sun, symbolizing heaven, warmth, and a new purity.

- In low honor, the coyote goes down to a dark cave, representing damnation and the rejection of holy light. In high honor, the deer steps into a heavenly field of light. Love that so much to be honest.

- Just the very Catholic vibe of Arthur's redemption. Doing good deeds, feeling guilt, all that.

- John's new life is basically this: "Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need." -Ephesians 4:28. John gives up his old life to be an honest laborer, a rancher, and a proper man.

- The Strange Man in RDR rides on a donkey, which is pretty interesting because Jesus Christ also made his grand entry on a donkey.

- Just the Strange Man in general to be honest. Some say he's God, others say he's the Devil, and others say he's Cain from the Bible, which is my personal favorite theory but whatever.

- Dutch's horse could be a reference to Revelations 6:8- "And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him." Dutch's rash actions caused the death of the gang and RDR's incarnate of Hades or Hell was Micah, following him. Dutch is the only one, canonically, to have a pale horse.

- "Am I prepared for eternal damnation? Am I passed any kind of saving? Or is that just fairy tales?" Arthur in his journal. I love this line so much because of its very agnostic nature whilst still showing the Christian mindset of 1899 America. This line also shows that Arthur is canonically agnostic which is a yippee from me because it's like the only thing me and this man have in common lmao 😭

- "Bad news awaits you, sir. Sadly, sooner than you think. But beyond the news, paradise awaits. Paradise.." Blind Man Cassidy to Arthur. Sorry but I just love that. High honor Arthur lived such an awful life but he still has a chance at paradise and heaven? Love that so much.

- God (pun intended), I love biblical symbolism. Couldn't you tell?

[http-sawposting]

🫀🫀🫀

and he has come to absolve you of your sins, the sacrificial lamb weeps for it knows it’s fate is sealed

[weebsinstash]

Kinda obsessed with the idea of a reader pregnant with Lucifer's kid and just he's really into it and wants to get married while the readers there being like damn I just wanted the bragging rights of saying I fucked the king of hell and now I have to be married to him !?!

Reader: ugh oh my god that dick was so fucking good, thanks Lucifer

Lucifer, currently painting sigils with his own blood on your tummy: oh my god, no, I know, right, it was amazing, I had an amazing time

Reader: hey uhhhhhhh by the way, what are you

Lucifer, taking a break from speaking ancient Latin incantations: oh hey, no don't worry about it it's totally cool I'm just, doing a thing here

Reader watching the very foundation of Hell shake around them like an earthquake as all the candles in the room burn higher and the unseen spirits of the damned sing comgratulatory praises for their dark lord: you know this kiiiiiiiiinda feels like you miiiiiight be doing something kinda sinister and magic-y right now

Lucifer, watching his symbol appear on your belly: whaaaaaaaaat, no, that's crazy! It's just a little.... surprise! Nothing to worry about! So hey also completely unrelated but I kind of need to splash some of this goat's blood on you--

I feel like sleeping or even FLIRTING with Lucifer is the ultimate case of fuck around and find out because at the very least you have an all powerful clingy depressed obsessive boyfriend in THE DEVIL and at his very worst you have you know THE DEVIL, treating you as his equal half, wanting all to bow before you, worship you, erecting churches with stained glass telling the Epic Tale of how you two fell in love, wanting you draped in fineries, at his side at all times, having only the best

I just feel like... he's one of those yandere that really could take you 0 to 100. You fuck the guy ONCE as like a drunken one night stand, a real "fuck it why not maybe it'll be fun" kinda romp, and then he's making plans behind your back about marriage because, well, he just loves you so much already that he can't see doing anything else! 🥰 like can you imagine going from getting cream pied to like only a week later some church is getting constructing with like biblical art of "oh how the king of hell met another and fell in love" and it's foretelling some epic saga that hasn't even. Happened yet. Like imagine the whiplash of finding out the guy you casually fucked is dedicating buildings to. A story of. How he impregnated and married you and you guys "lived happily ever after" and you still barely know him

I like the contrasting options of Lucifer intentionally impregnating you vs unintentionally because THE VISUAL of like. He's just nutted and you're laying there amd he looks down and suddenly there's this little glowing moving picture on your skin of a snake twining around, circling, becoming an apple with a heart or some-- this is a real specific genre of fetish I'm discussing here ok we don't need to like exactly describe whatever magical mark of pregnancy the devil gives you fjdnfjf. But the apple appears and he's blinking at it and, finally, it clicks, and he's all "BABY! B-BABY! IT'S A BABY HHHOHHHHH MY GOD" and he's like EXCITED but also just like. Do you think he'd get a little biblical drooling about 'your womb being blessed' or some shit. Your absolute fucking LUCK OR LACK THEFEOF if Lucifer turned out to ACCIDENTALLY BE CORRECT and you kind of WERE created to be his wife or end up with him, like GOD is up there, "yeah Luci I threw you a bone, enjoy it 👍" like SHIT the one time you ARE cosmically fated to have a mate and it's AFTER YOU DIE? It's also LUCIFER MORNINGSTAR???

I feel like, genuinely the only way Lucifer would mistreat the Reader is completely unintentionally, like he has a bout of depression and neglects you a little, or he becomes socially withdrawn and you think he doesn't like you but really he's just feeling sad or working on something that's really important to him. I mean. This is BESIDES the possibility of confinement but that's for your protection and it's not like you're in PRISON. This guy is clearly packed with goofy loving positive energy. He'll be taking you to the circus and to musicals with his daughter like you've always been a member of the family, getting you your own special throne to sit beside his own. He's having audience with like some wretched soul, there are flames, he's being TERRIFYING, telling them how they've betrayed him and he's going to tear their soul to pieces and sentencs them to eternal suffering, and then he turns to you, "I'm sorry am I making it too hot in here shnookums 🥰 I don't wanna make you and our lil hellion uncomfy 🥰" like.... truly, you got yourself a man that can do both

[midnights-dragon]

i don't think that normal people understand how viscerally hozier songs make me feel because listen. are you listening to me listen listen

i could be having my most soul crushing, exhausting, awful awful awful day. feeling so fucking low that i'm the fucking snake in genesis 3:14 crawling with my belly in the dirt. and andrew hozier-byrne, the fucking resurrected jesus or something because what the fuck no normal person should be able to make me feel this way, will hoist me up with his biblical symbolism lyrics about deeply irrevocable yearning and make me feel like the first nebulae to ever be breathed into existence by an angel because - because because because are you listening

because no one can hear heaven is not fit to house a love like you and i,or in the low lamplight i was free, heaven and hell were words to me, or i slithered here from eden just to sit outside your door, and not be so astrally projected that negative emotions are left behind as i rocketeer into the atmosphere of holy light that is his voice, his lyrics, his music

it is cathartic. it is revitalizing. it is visceral.

andrew hozier-byrne, you are a treasure for the ages.

[ditizygirl]

Editblr is a breeding ground for idolatry, ableism, racism and so much more all for a community about putting images together.

I've been here for only a year but I feel like I've seen it all, and the excuses oh my god the excuses. You are all 15-19, you should not have the mental capacity of a 8 year old. Your common sense is non existent and almost all of you guys are so fucking stupid it's pissing me off more than any god can understand. You are old enough to have logical thinking skills, you may have a disorder and it may be a reason but not an excuse.

Alot of you have forgotten the saying "Think Before You Talk" and I've sure as hell done alot of thinking. This is my deep dive into editblr.

Ableism

Typing quirks are a way of personal expression but why do so much of you hate to add plain text. I can understand to extent because plain text hates my head because of how long it can be but I'm not gonna act like a little bitch about it. I'm gonna add my typing quirk or even fonts itself to it.

I'm gonna ask someone to help me, or to do it for me. Stopping making excuses for ableism. Alongside with the typing quirks, your psds are ugly and eyestrainy. Psds also fall under racism because I have no idea why you guys are ignoring the fact some make dark skin characters lighter but in the case of ableism most of them are really bright and makes it hard to see.

Orange and brown? Green and yellow? Blue and brown? Why are you putting colours that can be so much eyesore together? And won't even tag as eyestrain and when someone does ask you only do it for one post.

Romanticization

This one is weird as fuck and I see no one mentioning it. Editblr highkey has a ddlg problem, this "little girl" aesthetic you guys have going on borderlines ddlg alot and its icky. The baby talk typing quirk is disgusting, stop it.

I'm not one to judge how someone copes with their trauma but what I DO judge is how you act when majority says its uncomfortable. Now this section I'm a bit unsure how to phrase it, gotta love dyslexia, but that isn't going to stop me.

There's alot of very uncomfortable romanticization of stalking which I've seen so much of alongside abusive relationships and the justification of these things.

Racism

Really can't escape this one unfortunately. Many of you are like kpop idols, you're too dyslexic towards the difference between appropriation and appreciation. Incase you forgot let me remind you.

You can not gift japanese names. Gifting names is a native practice therefore you can only gift native names. Also I've noticed you weirdos befriending people just to use their cultural names. I can't even say it east asian fetishization because its only Japanese.

Also for the love of God can you guys stop saying nonmem and non women especially when referring to sexualities. It's not hard to simply say "queer attraction to women" and "queer attraction to men".

Coming back to the "gifting" names thing, I think it's interesting how all of you conveniently have a Japanese friend who "gifted" you the name of a cute pink anime girl. Maybe I'll do a post later on how much of a bad liar you guys are.

Closed symbols is also another big problem you all have. No matter how much times you're told you can't use something you always cry "but my friend from xyz culture said it was ok!" One person can't speak for a whole culture. You're nothing but a coloinzer in disguise hiding behind the idea of aesthetic. If you want to know if a symbol is closed just use this site.

Goddess Personas

Yea this one is getting a whole section of its own. Like any people I am uncomfortable with goddess personas, especially being someone with biblical sources. Now the idea that a teenager on the internet is making people call them a goddess is strange isn't it?

In my opinion, they're all annoying, copy and paste, and I think not a lot of people talk about how the really bad ones get. You all love to indulge them, make them think they have power over them. You put them on a pedestal and praise them and get surprised when it all goes to their head?

Stop giving 14 years old power, stop indulging in their habits and letting it go their head. Forcing people to refer to you as their goddess? Their Lord and saviour? Their idol? Someone they must listen to? It creates a power inbalance which always leads to the weirdest of manipulation. Also all the engagekiss copiers are so obvious why would you want to copy the identity of a groomer? It says alot of about yourself if that's what you think is ideal.

Callout Posts

Now, personally, I believe that the only reason a callout post happens is because someone was affected, does it not? Very rarely would a callout post would be a fake one, especially if someone has more then one. If you defend someone who has more than one call out post that's on you and you're gonna end up making one some day I can genuine you that. People don't make them for no reason.

This is all I have to say for now. I hope you guys really consider what I have written here, or not, considering the fact you guys have shown multiple times you lack reading comprehension

@starriesse @dollicous @doveinne @firstgf @kiochisato @lamboll @cherryshh @narcbf @lavendergalactic @npditary @sprinkleoverdose @necroangelz @eskeys

[tortelette]

It is god awful 4 am in the Philippines (insomnia growing worse due to worry) and I have one fucking theory on what fucking Demian said in the epilogue of Chapter 4.

Demian fucking returns to the presence of Dante as the Sinners took a feast for themselves at some restaurant and talks to them about the meaning and true purpose of technology and the morality behind it along with the concept of greed. One line took a fucking slap on me whenever I kept reading his dialogue.

This is...

A "The Little Prince (TLP)" by Saint Exupéry reference said by the Little Prince himself when he met the stranded pilot in the desert.

Back then when I was still studying religious literature and our main topic is TLP, there are many biblical references here and there from the snake who bit him down to the desert where the pilot has been stranded upon for some time. The sheep has many symbolisms back in my lessons, the common ones that I get to see are the spiritual transcendence of the prince, the representation of the truth, and the beauty hidden from reality. Mind you all that the story of TLP is quite imaginative and a sad one that gives the hopeful yet real life lessons of friendship, value, love, and loss. Hence many symbolisms are interpreted here.

Now that I mention those things... what does it have to do with Demian telling Dante to draw him a sheep like they promised to him? Judging from the structure of his tone, it appears that Demian knew Dante before Dante took their clock prosthetic.

Well my theory is that the sheep is the symbolism of "realization" or more likely "seeing the truth of humanity." Dante is a blurry yet blank slate when they saw that they lost their memories yet retained a sense of a trail of their true goal. Dante wants answers (an obvious reflection of decision for a person who knows nothing of the world) in everything around them and they are the ones who let's out the final decision to handle in everything with the Sinner's help. Hence, they take semi-control in seeing EVERYTHING and witness it along with them. So far Dante has saw the lives of four of their sinners (Gregor, Rodion, Sinclair, and Yi Sang) and see how cruel and unfair of the life they went through. Dante sees them all since they resonated as well with the golden boughs and sees a portion of their troubled lives. A normal happening of humanity in The City.

Dante has to draw a "sheep" to Demian, more likely... Dante has to share to Demian the "truth of humanity that they have witnessed through resonance with the Sinners in a refreshed look." In this chapter, it appears that Dante has to share their side of the truth to Demian about Yi Sang's life yet they appear to be at a lost as always. Just like a sheep that strays away from the shepherd's guidance.

Remember Faust's remarks when she stated on what would be Dante's reaction about their decision to suppress the bronze bull when they get their memories back? It is implying for me at least that Dante is a dislikable or negative character. I mean... look at them when we first started the entire game. Demian must have known this too and probably wants to get Dante to draw a sheep for him now that he can have a more "innocent" or understandable outlook about humanity.

In TLP, the sheep (if removing the more complex representations of various literary analysis) is a literal representation of one's ability to appreciate the beauty of all things through the heart despite the appearance. All of the sinner's lives are miserable in some way yet they are still "beautiful" for us because they manage to strive through their problems, they seek on the right of their belief, they live on to face their traumas, and to accept help from others in order to get back up. The disgusting experiences of humanity in The City is a facade that people always see, but the actions they have done that either support or combat those experiences is what makes it beautiful.

The truth of humanity, is the suffering that they have been through.

It would be interesting that Demian has the title of "The Little Prince" as a nod to it.

EDIT: How does my unhealthy insomnia theory get a lot of interactions- I... I am scared.

[notedchampagne]

quickly sketched out my tlt ocs to explain them to oomf

roch cardine is a fourth house medic! their dog is a newfoundland named guinuea. from saint guineafort. roch is from saint roch saint of dogs, cardine from.the 4 cardinal virtues. 4 in biblical meaning is often attributed to the 4 creatures around gods throne as well as symbolizing completeness

"temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it."

the four cardinal virtues

shes on the field but specializes more in second-based magic in siphoning life from her…dog… to power the injured. haha! :] shes in the same sort of generation as fluke and lubonna. everyone makes fun of her for having that damn dog

in the THIRD HOUSE theres fluke trium (cav) and lubonna tierce (necromancer). lubonna is a prior princess before the tridentarii existed. fluke is from a type of wormlike parasite, lubonna from charles lucian bonaparte who introduced the Phoenicopteridae family (flamingos). flamingo because they get their color from the feeding on brine shrimp - you can see that lubonna actually has flukes hair attached to it - she chews flukes hair off for power but uses the tips as um. extensions :)

lubonna thinks of them like jennifer and needy. but when lubonna pushes fluke too far in a shepherd planet interaction with BOE, fluke fucking kills lubonna and joins boe

a few years later roch and their dog guinea are kidnapped by boe - roch is gravely injured and so is guinea. both could have technically healed given time but in their desperation to escape they siphoned too much from guinea and… he died. sorry.

roch is kept in BOE as a prisoner of war. now we have a third house cav that picked life at the cost of feeling disgustingly alone and betrayed, and a fourth house healer that chose solitude and power instead of suffering with company. they have a hatething going on

[mintaikcorpse]

Analyzing the Circus & Biblical Elements in Hellaverse: Asmodeus

And other things, I guess

The embodiment of Lust, one of the most dangerous sins in Mythology, your demon hoste, Asmodeus!

Something I absolutely love about the sins designs is the fact that they're all animals, with Lucifer being the only human one. It really adds to the whole circus element. But, while Ozzie is a chicken, I really also want to talk about the demonic aspects as well and why his design works for him!

Why Asmodeus is a Rooster

The first reason is because another word for Rooster is cock, so the Ruler of the Lust Ring is a giant cock. And, in this world, all the Goetia Demons are birds.

ANYWAYS, there's also other reasons why he's a cock (Im not calling them roosters anymore). In general, cocks symbolize masculinity, pride, enthusiasm, strength, honesty, and most importantly for Big O, sexuality. Makes sense, though. For farming, the entire point of roosters is to protect and mate with the females. And while Ozzie is most likely pan, and he's dating a dude, his entire thing is still sex.

The masculinity and pride element is there as well. Stereotypically, masculinity is being really buff and dominant. Ozzie is literally a king and is buff as hell (I still wonder why his arms shrink sm when he's in his regular outfit. Maybe Fizz is right about him being really good at "squeezing things in."

But, it also doesn't just mean physical strength, it can also refer to mental strength as well. And, let's be real here, Ozzie is one of the most mentally healthy characters in this show.

Strength can also be used for protection, and since roosters protect hens, it could also be seen with how Ozzie is very protective of Fizz and is also one of the few sins we've seen who seems to somewhat care about his citizens. From what we've seen of Lust, it's one of the safer and healthier rings to live in. Ozzie is shown to be very prideful of his sin as well, so it makes sense that he'd want to protect the people who feel lust and live in the Lust Ring, which is why he also despises noncon stuff. (I've heard some people say him not liking noncon stuff doesn't make sense bcuz that's the prime of lust, but SA is more wrath and greed than lust.)

But, his pride for his sin is the next thing. Roosters are prideful, and Ozzie is very prideful of his Ring and his work, and his club. Also, this is probably just a coincidence, but did you know that Lust & Pride were some of the most dangerous sins in mythology? I think it's bcuz they both alienate from God or smthn like that. I Kinda like these 2 overlapping for that reason.

Another thing: did you know that he's also a moth, which is why he has the fluff an antenna? Kolkocat on YouTube said that Vaggie is a moth bcuz of "women if the night referring to prostitution" (she was theorizing about her death, btw), and I think that fits. Val's a moth for the same reason. I also think the fluff could be lion related since they're also symbolized as kings.

Demon Elements

Asmodeus & Mammon are one of the two characters I've seen that look the most like their biblical counterparts, so talking about their designs is the most fun.

We've all noticed that Ozzie has three heads, right? That's actually from his biblical design!

This is from The Lesser Key of Solomon Book!

Honestly, I have no idea why he looks so fucking ugly. My Christian friend theorizes that it's because it's supposed to show that Lust is an ugly sin, and while I absolutely love that explanation, it probably means nothing, considering it was the 1500s and they just wanted to make demons look as ugly as possible so people wouldn't fall into sin.

But, I love how semlesy they incorporated the horse head and goat head into his design. Though, in the show, I think it's a gost head instead of a horse head. God, I need to talk about Bull and Goat symbolism now, don't I?

Bulls are interesting. They symbolize strength, but they also symbolize fertility. And, like cocks, they're also primarily used by farmers to mate with the females (his design really just fucking screams "HEY LOOK! HES THE EMBODIMENT OF LUST! HE FUCKS A LOT! DO YOU UNDERSTAND???")

Goats are easy. They symbolize the devil so much. Hell, the demon Baphomet is litterally just a winged goat. They're also commonly associated with demons bcuz of their eyes and horns. But they also symbolize another thing which is, you guessed it! FERTILITY.

Circus Elements

Actually going back tho the title elements, wooh! (I'm so sorry for getting off topic on all of these).

In a Tweet, Vivzie mentions that all the sins represent a Circus Act, with Bee being an animals trainer which is why she has so many hoops on her design and in her mansion. Ayy Lmao on YouTube theorizes that for Asmodues, he is a dancer and trapeze artist since his club has so many dance and trapeze things.

But, bcuz I'm a chatty little bitch, I want to add to this.

I think Ozzie could be seen as a secondary ringmaster to Lucifer. Yes, he's obviously a pimp, but his outfit reminds me of a cool, modern ringmaster, especially with the tophat, boots, and glowing suit.

It makes sense as well because his entire club has a Circus theme to it. And, again, Lust & Pride are said to be the most dangerous sins. Perhaps Lucifer communicated with him the most about Hell.

Also, bcuz I won't get to the others for a while, he also said theorized about this for the other sins

Satan (wrath): Strongman bcuz his app is a weight lifting app, Bee mentions his abs, and it makes sense the sin of Wrath would be Strong.

Mammon: Obviously a clown

Belphagor (sloth): He said contortionist since her ring has to do with Healthcare, but this person pointed this out, and I like this theory a lot better

Leviathan (envy): He chose Magician for them because they would want to conjure things that they don't have.

Thanks for coming to my messy essay that would make my English teacher cry in shame at the things she has failed to teach me :)

[alilaro]

I have some Thoughts on Evangelion, and I'm hyperfixating right now, so here's a massive info-dump on it. Thank you and I'm sorry.

(trigger warnings for: child abuse, child death, gore mention, pedophilia, mental health, depression, suicide, and potentially more.)

———————————————→

So, my take on the End Of Evangelion is like a 'Worst Timeline AU.' So what would've happened if Shinji had given into the crippling (justified) trauma and deepest depression of an abused, manipulated, and unfathomably damaged child soldier.

The way Misato constantly screams at him throughout the entire series to 'be a man' and pressures him to get into the EVA and fight literal biblical, kaiju-like angels.

The pressure of trying and failing to get a crumb of praise or approval from his neglectful and spiteful father.

The way people (and fans, tbh) get upset with him for constantly changing his mind. How if he doesn't pilot the EVA, either he or his friends could die. The pressure every adult puts on him. Or again, the absolute cosmic terror of just seeing—let alone having to murder these angels.

Of course, he quits all the time, he's 14. He's a child. An average adult with all the combat training in the world would easily do the same.

Yet he comes back again and again, because of the guilt, the self-loathing, the manipulation of the adults around him—

(who can have all the greatest intentions in the world, "the greater good", etc etc, and it doesn't change a goddamn thing that they are putting these children into death machines and treating it like if they dont do it they are selfish and worthless)

—that if he doesn't do it, his friends will do it and either they or others will die if it's not him.

Like, the point isn't that he can't make up his mind: it's the fact that even if he "gives up", he still keeps coming back, and putting himself before others, despite the grief, despite the pain, despite the trauma

A fourteen-year-old child refuses to stop getting up and trying. Which I feel is symbolic of the whole shows entire meaning, no matter how dark things are, how much you hurt, how much others hurt you, how you feel like nothing, and you want it all to just stop—the pain, the memories, the guilt, the crushing weight of complete utter depression—even as the darkest envelops you and holds you tight, you feel like you can never escape: there is ALWAYS a way out of it.

It's fucking hard, you will lose yourself in it, you will hurt so, so much—but eventually you can find your way out. Through time, through loved ones, through therapy, and more. It's never too late or someone is too far gone in their own despair that they can't be saved and brought back.

And that's not even mentioning the other children. Fans enjoy Asuka more than Shinji because she's got that quick, snappy, high-energy personality. She's overly proud and stubborn, and she loves to fight in her EVA. And Rei, she's the shy quiet girl (a Kuudere, even (didnt like writing that)) designed to be mysterious, and to speculate over. Who is she? Why is she so calm? Does she have a personality behind that demeanor?

But, just like Shinji, they are all child soldiers, and like him, they are products of trauma and manipulation by adults.

Rei, was made in a fool-hearted attempt to bring back Shinji's mother, Yui Ikari, by combining her remains with Lilith. What they got was Rei. An assimilation of Yui, Lilith, Eva, all combining into Rei Ayanami.

Her creators obviously had attachments to her, both having loved Yui before her death, and Gendo Ikari almost took her on as a daughter-like figure (Rei being the name he would've given to his child Shinji, if he had been born a girl,) and revoltingly even more than that.

But as the theme of the series goes, good intentions from adults mean very little, and often act as nothing more than an excuse for creating/doing inconceivably monstrous acts.

She is of course used as an EVA pilot, being able to manipulate her form into a 14-year-old. She is used as a tool. She is replaceable. She knows this. She has no desires because no one has ever cared enough about Rei as her own person to let her think for herself, asked her what she wants, her likes, her dreams, her fears.

Rei's entire existence at this point is to serve, and in an eerie way, the only thing she wants is to serve Gendo, because he's shown her the only breadcrumbs of "compassion" she's ever known.

And then Shinji comes along. Shinji has no idea what she is, only that she is another EVA pilot like himself. He speaks to her as he would anyone else. He cares about her, and her well-being as another person. Actual true compassion.

In episode 06, when Rei is hurt and thought to have died by Shinji, he pries open the hatch to her EVA, ignoring the scalding heat that burns his hands to do so. He finds her alive and cries, and she smiles for him.

This scene is an exact parallel that takes place before with Rei and Gendo (Shinji's father.) He pries open the hatch, scalding his hands too, and finds her alive inside. It's identical except for one thing: Compassion.

Shinji fights to free and help Rei, and when he sees her alive, he is overcome with relief that she, Rei, is alive. He is in tears, he tells her she isn't nothing, implying her life is worth something and people care about her.

When Gendo does it, he does it like a man trying to save a valuable asset. He sees she's okay, and mutters 'I see', and that's the end of it.

Again, in episode 23, when Rei actually dies and is replaced; she is confronted by herself (the Meta Rei, the Rei in her purest, most godly self. A combination of all her sense of beings,) and realizes that she is feeling, she is lonely, she is suffering, and for the first time she cries, and asks herself if this just for her love of Gendo, before sacrificing herself in death to save everyone—specifically shinji.

She is replaced by her many clones, but this time she regains some of her memories, her feelings, her anger, and she is more human now, less vessel, more soul. She is Rei.

In the End of Evangelion, we see the depths of Gendo's depravity. He wants his wife, Yui, back as she was, of course. But in the meanwhile, there's Rei. Rei who is part Yui—a substitute. He touches her breast, an attempt to merge with her, and moves his hand down further to rest between her hips, inside her.

Rei is as much his daughter figure and a child, as she is a part of his own wife, and arises from this: an Oedipus Complex. Gendo treats her as a disposable tool, yet holds Yui at his highest priority. She is his to do with as she likes. How many times has he used her like this? How many times has he committed these atrocities with this child behind closed doors?

Amongst everything else Rei is, she is also a victim of pedophilia.

And in her final moments, while he attempts to merge with Rei in a delusional attempt to bring back Yui, Rei becomes her own being. Rei puts her foot down and says no. She's had enough.

"I will not be a puppet for you to control."

She takes the hand of Adam, fully merges with Lilith, and becomes a God.

And what does she do with all that power? She takes it all, and gives it to Shinji. The one person that ever consistently showed her care and compassion, showed her love. Made her realize she is her own person, gives her the strength to realize her worth and refuse Gendo Ikari, and choose her own path.

Her choice can be argued as good or bad, both. But in the end it was REI's choice, and no one elses.

Asuka uses her anger and her fighting as a means to cope with a barbaric childhood. Her mother, Kyoko, underwent a Contact Experiment when Asuka would have been ~5 years old.

Kyoko survived, but lost her mind completely, thinking her real daughter was actually a doll, and leaving Asuka completely neglected by her mother, all whilst begging and trying to convince her that SHE was her real daughter, not some doll she clung to.

Meanwhile, her father was completely unaffected by this, and even had moved on with another woman (An affair that had been going on before Kyoko fell apart completely, the woman being Kyoto's doctor, that she knew about, and took place in their own home while both mother and daughter were present.) Throwing himself back into his own life with this new woman, and job, Asuka was left with nothing.

Asuka's mother finally snaps and plans her own suicide. She invites Asuka, and with nothing else and wanting nothing more than to be acknowledged by anyone, agrees to take their lives together.

As if all of this isn't bad enough, as a final blow, Asuka's mother takes her own life without Asuka, leaving a five-year-old CHILD to find her mother hanging lifelessly, betrayed and alone again.

Her entire personality isn't because she's 'cool' or 'bossy', its an unfathomably traumatized child, constantly in pain and unable to trust anyone, because she has been taught as an infant that she can not rely on the people meant to care for her, because her parents taught her that in the most brutal and disturbing way possible.

There's even reference to her trying to repeat her mother's suicide after disappearing from the fight, only to be found gravely injured and withering away in a bathtub.

She fights so hard to be independent because she refuses to let herself be hurt and abandoned again.

At the End of Evangelion, even when she is screaming and crying, bleeding to death after being speared through the eye, losing power, and being cannibalized alive in her EVA, she is still so desperate, so angry, that she refuses to die, swearing vengeance on her enemies through dying rattled breaths, and it isn't until she is bombarded with blades that she finally succumbs. And at the hands of NERV.

Again, she, and every single EVA pilot, is only 14 years old.

tldr: The series is about child trauma, children being turned into soldiers, the failings of adults around them, and the tragically brutal and real aftermath of the wreaks of havoc that would have on a child.

[sparrowsupportgroup]

religious symbolism with both ais and leander -

Basically these two fucking weirdos, Ais and Leander, are like God in their own way. They anoint “sinners”(the sinners being people drinking from the Seaspring, joining the Groupmind vs. the people joining Leander’s Bloodhounds) through “blood offerings”(aka drinking from the Seaspring or craving your name into wood and joining the Bloodhounds)

Both Ais’s and Leander’s concepts having references to blood is interesting because blood is symbolically seen as LIFE. By taking an blood oath(Leander) or drinking blood(Ais), you’re essentially absorbing a new life within you; when you take the blood offering, you’re being purified and made anew

Interpretation of blood offerings from The Old Testament - From the perspective of Christianity that everyone is a “sinner,” the forsaken people that drink from Ais’s Seaspring and the lost people who join Leander’s Bloodhounds are like sinners who take the blood (aka the life) of the victim, which is the source of atonement that said sinner is looking for, in hopes of finally achieving a holy union with God

Both can change lives like a God would, they both have religious connotations - Leander’s whole design/lore touches on his powerful magic, Christianity, God, the Virgin Mary, and priesthood. The fact his cult gang is called Bloodhounds is so interesting because God was frequently called The Hound Of Heaven by Puritans because God will relentlessly pursue an fleeing lost soul in order to force them into accepting His Divine Love and Grace. This is similar to how Leander slowly wore down the bartender and got her to crave her name in wood and join the Bloodhounds and his slow yet persistent wearing down of Mhin

The religious symbolism is more subtle with Ais but it’s there - joining the Groupmind is preceded by drinking from the Seaspring for a “miracle” guided by Ais, in which the drinker’s trauma and identity is washed away, similar to how one’s sins is washed away during a baptism, how Ais calls MC Sparrow and biblically, sparrows represent God's love and care for His creation, as well as the importance of humility and trust in God's provision/plus there’s this gospel song “His Eye On The Sparrow”(heavy eye imagery with Ais)/his “blood in water” concept makes me think of how drinking blood of Christ in Christianity signifies His human body and death and eventual resurrection, and the heavy blood-and-water imagery in the Bible that speaks of both the purification powers of water and the sacred price of blood that represents Christ’s martyrdom is similar to Ais being able grant the forsaken a miracle(cleansing power of the Seaspring) but it comes with a terrible sacrifice(losing your sanity/identity and being in a Groupmind). Ais is a martyr in the sense that he’s a host for Ocudeus and is responsible for “curing” the people that come to him for help

[junibugs]

i know the end

Pairing: Eren Jaeger x Reader

Reader: afab! Reader, she/her pronouns

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 18,653

Summary: Alternately, Eren returns from Marley and back to Paradis rather than going through with the raid on Liberio. When he returns, his spirit is low and his health is declining, but Reader helps build him back up despite it all.

Content: Canon-Divergence, Universe Alteration, More than Friends to Ex-Friends to Lovers, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Smut

Other Content: Reader gives Marley! Eren a nice bath, Nudity, Slightly Toxic Relationship, Mentions of Abandonment, Eren is sooo touched starved, awkward boners, Mentions of Separation Anxiety, strangely intimate, maybe a little bit of biblical symbolism but nothing drastic, Love Confessions, Semi-Public but not rly, Eren and Reader are both inexperienced

Content Warnings: Injury (Amputation, Eye Injury, Self-Inflicted, Starvation), Canon-Typical Violence, Smut (Masturbation Mention, Virginity Mention, Handjob, Fingering, Cunnilingus, Unprotected Sex, Praise, Multiple Orgasms, Light Breeding Kink, Multiple Creampies), Potential Spoilers

Authors Note: Diamond Dondada - “She’s Back” [Freestyle] (0:01-0:09)

Eren couldn’t remember how he got here, sitting in an empty room, on an empty bed, staring at the wooden floor, but somehow he knew he was in Paradis. 

Thankfully, the shock of return has numbed out the phantom pain of his absent leg, and the burning beneath his eyelid; he can no longer feel the dirt and blood caked beneath his fingernails, nor the scratch of his facial hair on his skin, or the matting of the bandage into his unruly hair. He can’t really feel anything, and he guesses he should be thankful for that too.

There was no ache in his chest when his eyes met those of his dearest friends, and he couldn’t decide whether it was his or theirs that were hollow and dulled; perhaps both. There was no sinking of his stomach when he realized that no one had a fucking clue of what to do next in this war with no end. And he felt no guilt as he sat motionless on the floor of the blimp on the ride back to Paradis; feeling all their empty eyes on his tattered figure, full not of pity but of disgust.

Perhaps he can remember some things.

He doesn’t heal, even now that his plan has been abandoned, even after he first decided all those weeks ago that he was done, even when he has no more reason to sulk around absent of a limb and an eye. For something inside of him tells him that he doesn’t deserve it yet, that he doesn’t deserve the sweet burning sensation of his body filling back up from the inside out, that he doesn’t deserve the ache of the new muscles afterwards, that he doesn’t deserve to get back the part of him he lost in Liberio.

So Eren sits in an empty room, on an empty bed, staring at the wooden floor, in a building on Paradis; where his first home stood, where he grew up, spoke his first words, learned how to read and write, but somehow he wasn’t home.

***

“You’d think he’d at least say something…” Sasha mumbles, words mushed together by the hand she rests her cheek on. She’s visibly distressed, brows pulled in and lips downturned into a heart-aching frown.

Her eyes flit towards the stairs, for up them is where he resides in that empty room on that empty bed. He was the most cold to her, and she knew it. Although it was next to nothing, he at least spared the others a glance; he couldn’t even look at her, and everyone knew it, but refused to acknowledge it, refused to ask why.

“Just give him a little bit,” Mikasa says quietly, “He’s probably shook up.” Her voice quiets.

And at her words, everyone sinks a little further into the couches, chests deflating with audible sighs; not with contentment or relaxation, but in surrender. Their faces droop into frowns, and eyes grow heavy with sleep deprivation, but they stay just barely awake to jolt upright with every shuffle of feet above their heads.

It’s near midnight when Levi has finally had enough, his flexibility finally stiffening to where he wakes them one final time. He had given them time to let their minds settle as one, but he knew that their future progress would be little if he allowed them to rest like this any longer. 

He stands before the fireplace, the embers glowing low in the ash, deep oranges and browns flickering across their faces in the dark as they settle on the sofas, and says as gently as he could muster while maintaining volume, “Get up.”

And there isn’t a sudden jolt awake, where their hearts pound and flutter like birds beneath their chests at the unexpected noise, they wake as if they were expecting it. Eyes blink open in slow motion, bodies raise up from their slump along the back and arm rests, limbs stretch out and forward and pull soft groans from their lips.

Levi doesn’t have to repeat it for them to trudge to their respective rooms. The only words spoken are the soft whispers between Sasha and Connie on who gets the bottom bunk in their shared room that night.

You’re the last up from the couch, taking more than a few moments to stare at the rug beneath the couches that adorns the wooden floor before getting up slowly. Your knee bumps the center table, and you feel your feet get caught in the fibers of the rug, and it’s a stumbling, heavy, slow rise; because your limbs are too heavy for your body, and your head is too foggy to help, and in the end, you’re just too tired to care.

But instead of slipping past the staircase that rests besides the fire to return to your temporary room just like the others had, you take a step up, and then another, and Levi watches you hike your heavy feet up the steps over and over and over and doesn’t stop you; he watches from the living space, with empty eyes and sinking shoulders, and lets you disappear past the banister.

You hear the creaking of the old wood floor, but it’s not from beneath your feet. It comes from down the hall, past a closed door, where Eren rises from the bed to stand guard as the groan of the stairs meets his ears.

It’s a confirmation that he’s still alive, and that he hasn’t escaped—not that he wants to. But it also tells you that he’s still conscious, still awake.

And shifting wood he hears tells him that someone’s upstairs, that someone is going to check in on him in just a few moments. And for once, for the first time in his life, he really hopes it’s Levi; that Levi will rap his knuckles against the door, that Levi will force him to open up, that Levi will be the one to send another kick across his face and not Hange, not Mikasa or Armin, not Jean, not Sasha, not you. 

Because if the others come to his door, if the others are those whose footsteps get louder and louder and come closer and closer, and if he has to be met with a face that’s not stony and cold and blank, but one that’s so depressingly empty—not just blank, but empty—he would split at his seams.  

You hear nothing as you draw closer; there’s no groaning floorboards, no knock of his crutch against the wood. Eren has gone silent behind the comfort of the closed door, but still, you knock.

You don’t even wait for him to swing it open, for you know it won’t happen. You lean forward and press your ear, chest, and palms against the oak; listening for the drop of a pin.

“Eren,” You say, just loud enough where you were positive he could hear you through the door.

And there was nothing.

But Eren stood just past the door, mirrored on the other side, with his palm and ear flush as he listened to the timbre of your voice through the wood. And oh, how his heart aches. He can feel his ribs close in on his lungs, and can feel the muscles in his throat grow tight, and his hands twitch as he forces back the overwhelming want to just throw open the door and look at you.

The need to see your face, the need to replace the last expression of you he has in his mind—one that was riddled with disappointment and sadness—with one that’s just a little less so, begins to fight against his need to keep the door shut, just in case if the look in your eyes has gotten darker.

“Eren,” You say again, in a voice that makes him seem like he’s a child who’s locked himself away after an argument. 

But is that so wrong? Even though he was dragged up the steps by his superiors and had the door closed in on him, he wasn’t ever told to stay, and the door wasn’t ever locked. But at the same time, no one has invited him out, no one has opened the door for him; not even you as you press yourself against it with your hand inches away from the old and rattling knob.

It wasn’t a physical lock he had placed on that door, but one he made out of the metals of his actions, his words. One molded out of the strongest minerals, one with no matching key; not even the one that had dangled around his neck for so long, and then was left on your bedside table before his departure—the one that he knows was tucked beneath the thick nylon neckline of your uniform. Not even the sight of that thin leather string around your neck was enough for him to open that door.

***

It was a safe house, Eren learned, in the countryside just past Sina. 

From what he could make out from the blurring memories he had of being brought there, it was nothing special; but perhaps that’s the point. Onlookers wouldn’t suspect it as anything more than a house of a wealthy farming family. 

It was a larger, tudor style home, with grid-like windows, deep brown timbering, and a thick chimney that belongs to the fireplace in the living room. There was no structural security besides the deep woods, no weapons to keep him inside, his windows weren’t even locked; only deep beige curtains kept him away from the outside. He could leave if he really wanted to… but he doesn’t, so he won’t.

Although it was nowhere near similar to the house he grew up in as a child, he hated how homely it felt. Being greeted by a porch, with rocking chairs and a knocker on the front door, a coat rack in the foyer—Christ’s sake there’s a fucking foyer—it made him nauseous. 

It made him nauseous because he didn’t deserve it. After leaving them for dust, giving them a wretched fate, burdening their minds and bodies with all the stress his being had forced onto them… God, how he didn’t deserve it. 

They do, though. They deserve rocking chairs and coat racks and living rooms; they deserve more than a bite of something that tastes only faintly like home.

His palms stung with the after burn of how hard that slap in their faces was… that despite their efforts and his sins, they all end with the same fate.

But it hurts him even more knowing that this sliver of normalcy is not forever, that they can only play house for so long, that eventually, they’ll have to return to how it was. And even though he’s holed up in a room that isn’t his, in a house that isn’t home, he hopes they can stay this way for just a little bit longer.

Because he can hear the clinking of dishes the next morning through the ventilation, and the rushing of running water through the pipes, and the muffled murmurs of Levi and Hange before they’re joined by the others. And he doesn’t open the door when you knock to let him know that breakfast is done, and he doesn’t open it when you tell him you’ve brought him a plate. But he does open it when he’s counted sixteen of your steps down the stairs, and he swipes the filled plate from the wooden banister just outside his door, and eats every last bit of cooked eggs and buttered bread and beans and fried tomatoes and gosh how he wishes he had the valor to go down and ask for more.

But he doesn’t. 

***

You know he’s alive in there; he’s eating the small meals you bring for him, he’s sneaking off to the bathroom in the dead of night, but you haven’t seen him in days and something about the disconnect between the seen and unseen has unease brewing in your stomach. 

And on the fourth day you’ve falsified a living at this house—this house that was built to host a queen and not a torn down and torn apart special operations squad—you’ve just about brought yourself to breaking down that door.

Because you fucking hear him in there. You fucking hear him moving around in there, and you hear his tossing and turning in the bed, and you hear the stupid knock of his wooden crutch against the wooden floor instead of the even steady steps of two feet because he’s refusing to let himself heal and it makes you want to scream.

And it’s worrying them as well. You can see the way Mikasa and Armin look to each other at breakfast when they realize that he hasn’t decided that this will be the morning he comes down, and you see the way Jean grows bored with no one to keep him on his toes, and you see the way Hange bites at the inside of their cheek with worry for his health and wellbeing.

It makes you so angry because although the disappointment and tension won’t go away if he opens himself up just a smidge, the worrying and the anxiety and the longing will. 

You know how he makes them feel, but you know how he made them feel; and you know how they want to remember, because you do too.

Seeing him turn into someone you know he doesn’t want to be has pulled your heartstring taut. Watching him slip from a squirrely kid with bright eyes and a quick temper into someone so terrifyingly unpredictable and distant has been excruciating. 

It’s an understatement to say that you miss him so dearly. Ever since your eyes met on the blimp you’ve been swarmed with memories of when his gaze was fiery and not cold. When he looked at you with passion burning behind his eyes instead of shame.

It’s been a few years since he’s talked with you without a drop of hopelessness leaking into his voice. And you miss when your late night conversations where you lay facing each other on your bed, looking into the depths of each other's eyes, both swallowing down the urge to surge your lips forward, didn’t end in his words turning melancholy and his gaze drifting away.

When you got stuck on the words, “I miss Eren” over and over for those months of his leave, it wasn’t only for his physical absence. You haven’t seen that thick-skulled, frenetic boy you fell in love with in years. And you wish you could say it was hard for you to love who he’s become, but it’s not. You love him far too easily.

You tried to stop yourself. After he left, you told yourself that you couldn’t do this anymore; you didn’t want to love him anymore, and you didn’t want him to feel the same. In a world like this, with people like you two, you couldn’t love safely; so when he left, you told yourself that he would never return. 

But he did.

You heard from Levi late one night that he had written home again, but the contents of his letter had drastically changed from those sent formerly. He wanted to come back. He was coming back. And instead of feeling your heart drop into your stomach, you felt it swell in your chest. 

Eren wants to come home.

His eyes found yours first when he was tugged up into the blimp; like he was looking for them beforehand. And you hated how he looked at you; like he knew you were tired of him, disappointed, exhausted. You were. But you wanted nothing more than to wrap your arms around him and cry.

Eren’s home.

And you forgot your promise. One look at him and you were seventeen all over again, stupid and in love. 

***

It’s the fourth day when Eren opens his door for someone behind it, and not to slither out of it in the pitch of night, darkened in secrecy. He’s met with solemn blue eyes, deeper than the sea, brighter than the sun, that look at him with heavy nostalgia and hidden disgust. Armin looks at him like he knows he hasn’t washed in weeks, and if Eren looks close enough, he thinks he can see Armin’s nose scrunch with disapproval.

“Hey, Eren.” He says, with his meek voice, soft and silky, relieved, but weighty with somber. 

It’s easier to see the shifts in his expression when his hair is cut short like this. Eren can see the ends of his brows twitch, his ears blush a hot red, and his jaw tense up now that Armin can’t hide deceit behind the former shag of his blond bangs. But it makes it hard to look at him, because all Eren can see is how his soft face would be bloodied by his own fists if he hadn’t sent that letter home.

“Armin,” Eren says, indefinitely, like he waits to tag something onto the end.

They’re quiet as Armin’s eyes pass over his disheveled figure, for Eren knows he’s looking and doesn’t care to stop him. His eyes catch and pause on the ratty bandage wrapped around his head, and then the knotted pant leg where his left knee should be, but it’s empathy and not pity that swell in his irises, because Eren’s plan had knocked out two birds with one stone, and Armin knows the pain of self-infliction all too well.

“Why aren’t you healing?” Armin asks. He knows why he didn’t heal, Eren had explained it in the letters, but he wants to know why he doesn’t heal. But thinking after a moment, Armin realizes he knows the answer to that too.

The air has gotten thick enough where a wall has been put up between them despite the door being open. They both want to reach for each other, pull together into an embrace, but both are too worried to initiate, worried the other will decline. So they turn hot under the other's gaze, trying to avoid eye contact, until one of them finally breaks.

It’s Armin who does, reaching forward with a pale hand to grasp Eren’s fingers between his own. He remembers how warm Eren runs when heat spreads over his fingers as Eren accepts his action with a small squeeze.

“We were all worried,” Armin murmurs, “Especially her.”

You.

“‘shouldn’t’ve been…” He grumbles, but he flushes warmly.

“But we were, and we still are. You’ve locked yourself away, not eating more than a child’s size ration, refusing to heal, and sitting in your own filth,” Armin’s voice wavers, “I know, I know that it’s strange to come back and pretend that you’re home and pretend like this war is over, but just for a moment, Eren please, just let us see you.”

But he can’t let them see him like this, not again. The once on the blimp was far enough shameful to last Eren the last four years of his life, perhaps longer.

Armin has decided he’s done with the conversation, and finishes with, “I’d heal. She’s going to be up soon. ‘said she’d help you wash up.” And releases Eren’s hand gently. And that should comfort Eren, it should make his heart warm with admiration, but it just makes his body go rigid.

“It’ll freak her out if you don’t.” Armin gives Eren a tight smile, and turns to disappear down the stairs.

And then it’s a rush, starting with a slamming door, then blazing steam and winding flesh, weaving, burning, melting from the inside out until his growing leg tears through the knotted fabric, and his lashes flutter against the bandages. It’s a burst of energy he hasn’t had in a while, a hurry to fix himself into something you would find less pitiful. 

But even as you find him on his empty bed, clothes tattered from the life he lived in Marley, torn apart with his healing process, blood settling in the grooves of his hands, hair tousled and knotted, and his stare blank to the floor, you feel anything but pity; instead, longing.

“Hey,” You say, fingers still lingering on the door handle. Unlocked.

And all the air has been sucked from Eren’s lungs like a vacuum; and his chest is getting tight, and there’s a lump building in his throat, his fingers dig into his thighs, and he wants to lift his head from its gaze on the floor to look you in the eyes, but he’s scared. He’s scared not of you, but of what your expression will be. Is it blank and empty like his own, somber and nostalgic like Armin’s?

“Eren.” You say. 

He thinks he hears a hint of disappointment lingering in your throat, like you could read his thoughts; disheartened by his fear, discouraged by no response.

“I’m… I don’t—”

“Stop,” You sigh, crossing the wooden floor with long strides, and slipping your hands beneath his arms to wrap around his lean frame to pull two bodies together into one.

He joins you willingly, rising off the bed and winding his arms around you, burying his face into your neck, clutching at the soft linens adorning your body with his rough palms. His face furrows tight, eyebrows drawing in and eyes squeezing shut as he hides in the crook of your jaw, breathing in the fresh and organic scent of your skin. And he holds you so tight that tiny wheezes escape your throats. 

Eren wants to cry as he feels the familiarity of your body beneath his touch, against his own, once more. You’re soft, yet so strong with muscle the regiment has forced you to have. He lets out a relieving sigh, and his hands claw at your back to pull you closer, grab you tighter.

He smells like the copper of blood and the depth of dirt; his hair is slippery yet tangled, and smells hollow and damp like an old concrete basement. But in the give of his neck, just beneath his ear, where your nose nestles close to his skin, you still smell the virile musk that is so definitely Eren.

It’s Eren that you hold beneath your palms, that you feel in the dips of lean muscle and the trembling of a body under your fingers. Three months isn’t long, but when you’re scared to death about not what could happen to him, but what he could do to himself, makes it feel unbearably long. It’s Eren pressed against your body, holding you back, pulling you close.

Although those moments at night where the two of you lay half conscious, battling sleep, breaths skimming over each other’s lips, were much more intimate than the hold you share now, you’ve never been so close to each other before. Your bodies are so close, so flush; warmth brews in your chests and in the spaces that aren’t pressed together, and the feeling that swarms and buzzes in your head has you wondering why you’ve never embraced like this before.

And then, Eren’s pulling away, reminding you; you don’t do this because he doesn't let you. Those passing moments of relief and honesty, were a slip up. He doesn’t do this. But he pulls away because he wasn’t used to it, scared because he liked it.

There’s a heavy silence as your arms float back down to your sides and your back straightens out. 

Eren tucks his chin to his chest. He waits for a scolding, or maybe a confession; something that would hurt his heart and slip tears over his lashes.

“We don’t have to talk or anything, ‘just wanted to help you clean up.” You murmur. 

It’s an odd suggestion, questionable in motive, but the only thing you want from him if you were to strip him down and scrub him clean would be the privilege to see him look like how you remember; with silky hair, a bare face, and tanned skin—absent of filth and bandages.

“You don’t have to.” Eren says, but he doesn’t protest. It’s been too long since he’s been able to spend appropriate time in the bath; only getting countable moments to wash himself down with water far too cold for his preference.

“You wouldn’t do it if someone didn’t force you.”

“I would.”

“But you haven’t yet.” 

Eren goes quiet in answer. I know.

“Let me help you,” You tilt your head towards the door, aiming past the frame and down the hall, where the bath rests behind another door.

“I never was not going to,” He looks you in your eyes for a brief moment, and then flicks his own away.

He could do it himself, but he had a terrible feeling it wouldn’t go too well. The idea of stripping down to nothing and having to stare at himself in the mirror, then muster together enough strength to scrub his skin raw, sounds absolutely exhausting. Sure, he spent sleepless nights in the trenches, pushing his body past its limit until it forced itself to compensate, but now that he’s home… he’s had enough trouble just lifting a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips.

And he doesn’t even want to think about looking in the mirror.

“Come on.”

He makes his way to the bathroom with one foot bare and one eye still covered, while you disappear farther down the hall to retrieve clothes, castile, and bath towels, and anything else you found suitable for washing him. 

You knock before entering the washroom, but Eren hasn’t shed his clothes to make you have needed to. He sat himself on the toilet, drawn in on himself, and eyeing the freestanding bath to his left. The sight of a spout on one of the long sides of the tub, followed by piping that disappears into the floor, excites him. It excites you too. Even though the intensity of the war had somehow led to the privilege of having running water where you reside, childhood taught you to be grateful for whenever you get it.

He looks at you as you set your gathered things onto a little wooden table beside the sink, listening to the clinking of glass and metals as your hands set them beside each other. You’ve brought him towels big and small, soaps and oils for his skin and hair, soft and clean linens to slip on afterward, and he thinks he also sees a razor and lather to shave.

Suddenly, he’s grateful he hadn’t chosen to wash yet. His wouldn’t be as near as adequate as yours.

“I just kinda got… everything. I don’t know your routine or anything so I thought it would be better safe than sorry. I also got some things if you wanted to shave too,” You say softly, feeling over the knuckles of your fingers as he looks over what you’ve brought.

Eren doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to tell you that he so badly wants you to lather up his face and shave it bare, to soap up his hair and brush it smooth, to rub suds into his skin and leave trails of clean skin in the wake of a rag. So instead of expressing his desire, he says softly, “Thank you.”

You give him a tiny nod before slipping past him and reaching for the spout of the bath. It creaks as it turns, but it still holds sturdy as water bursts from it and splashes to the porcelain bottom. Before plugging the drain, you turn to Eren again. 

“How hot do you want it?”

If it were another day, maybe another life, Eren would have joked at your choice of words. Instead, he stands and moves to lean over the edge of the bath with you to let the water rush over his hands; gauging the temperature, savoring the feeling. 

It takes a moment before it’s the temperature of preference—hot enough that it feels cold—and he removes his hand and nods to tell you that you can stop pushing the handle. Then, you pull on the knob beside the spout, and the drain closes shut, water pooling at the bottom and climbing up the sides.

You’re not yet ready for the next part; when Eren will have to shed his filthy clothes into a pile on the floor until there’s nothing keeping your eyes off of the sin of his flesh. But he’s already removing the bandage around his head and discarding it to the tile, letting his worn jacket and stained button up follow with it.

At the first flash of the skin of his stomach, you avert your eyes to the things you retrieved for him, pretending to consider adding more to the pile.

Eren follows your eye-line, catching on the glint of the blade on the wood, and stops undressing before he speaks, “Can you help me with… shaving?”

It’s embarrassing to ask. His cheeks have flushed hot and he can’t look you in the eyes when the last word in his sentence jumps up a pitch in question. It makes him feel incapable, unable, inadequate; a nineteen-year-old boy should know how to shave his face when needed. But he knows how, just doesn’t want to. He’d rather feel the touch of your hands against his jaw and feel you run the careful edge of the blade against his skin.

There’s a pause, and then a smile that splits across your lips before you tuck it away, “Yeah.”

He sits back on the toilet, not bothering to replace his shirt; not wanting to put the dirty back on, and not wanting to dirty the clean. 

You let the water of the spout flow over the lathering brush until the bristles are heavy and dark, then pull the side table a bit closer to where Eren sits so the lather and blade are in your reach when you stand between his knees.

He pushes his hair out of his eyes, shifting in his seat to ready himself, and watches you as you swish the brush around the lather, letting it become white and foamy on the end.

His breathing pauses as you take a gentle hold to his chin, tilting his face to the side to swipe the thick cream over his cheek, jaw and neck. Your fingers are soft with him, bracing his face like he’s a porcelain doll, brushing over his skin with careful precision like the lather is paint and he is your canvas. It sends shivers from his nape and down his spine until goosebumps are scattering over his bare flesh.

He looks sweet sitting there, hands in his lap, foam on his face, and before you bring the blade to the skin beside his ear, you admire him. His look has changed significantly, from the structure of his face, to the build of his body. The hair that used to tease the sharp of his jaw now stretches and tapers down to his collarbones, and the coarse hair that has sprouted itself along his jaw, chin, and upper lip ages him significantly; placing more distance between the Eren that sits before you and the Eren that you knew months ago. 

His figure has remained lean, but the months away have brought significant growth in his height and composition. You were brought to your toes when he rose to his feet in your arms, and as you run your eyes over the muscle in his chest, there are shadows and lifts and falls that you couldn’t point out before. It makes your face warm.

His eyes flutter open before you can admire any further, and only then do you notice the graying of the lashes and dulling of the iris of the eye that was formerly hidden behind bandages. It was like someone failed to remember to paint the pigments of his right eye. 

You wonder why it didn’t heal correctly.

You’re pulled out of your admiration by the flick of his eyes to your face, and continue on with your task at hand while your roles have switched.

It’s Eren’s turn to acknowledge the changes that have happened to you in the moments of his absence—not only from the ones recent, but every moment he failed to really look at you since he met you all those years ago. As you look at him so carefully, with cautious precision as you line the blade to his face, he looks into the depths of your eyes; and although you haven’t safely known him for so long and now hold a blade to the edge of his throat, he cannot find a hint of malice in them. And comforts him to know that even after all that time, you still care for him like you did when you both knew you loved each other, you were only afraid to say it.

The scratching of the blade against the coarse hair on his face makes it feel like you’re scraping off a layer of decay, and it satisfies him more than anything to feel you going over each pass twice or thrice to make sure everything has been scoured off. Sure, he appreciated the anonymity that the scruff on his face had granted him in Marley, and how it allowed him to separate himself from the character he had to be. But now that he’s back in Paradis, he feels himself blending with the person he had become, and now you were ever so cautiously cutting out and off the malignance that is that person.

He hopes you don’t see his face and chest flushing red, and he sure hopes you don’t feel his skin heating up in response to his wandering thoughts. He’s been humiliated enough and doesn’t think he can manage much more. You don’t say anything if you do notice it… and you do. As you pass over the lighter and softer hair on his lower cheeks, the fingers that pull his skin taut are warmed by his flesh; and for a second you’ve thought you’ve shaved at him a bit too hard, for the redness of skin was growing more visible by the moment, but you put the two together and even then the skittering of your heart doesn’t halt.

“You’re blushing,” You state, not looking up from your work; too scared to take your eyes off the blade, and too shy to look into his eyes.

“Yes.” He admits.

“Why?”

“You’re very close.”

You hum softly, changing your grip on his face, tilting his head back to reach the skin beneath his jaw. “That’s never bothered you before.” It’s a jump. You hope it encourages him to return to the banter you shared before, and doesn’t startle him instead.

But it does both. He swallows hard beneath your fingers on his throat.

“It’s not bothering me.” He gives, and it’s your turn to feel warmth seeping over your face.

“It’s doing something to you,” You take your bottom lip between your teeth, struggling to focus on his neck, finding yourself spacing out to the sound of his voice.

“It is.”

Those two words resonate in you the hardest. They bounce around in your head, reverberate through your chest, and swim around in your stomach at his confirmation that your proximity does in fact have the same effect on him as it does on you.

It comforts you knowing that he still feels something; that he’s returned as not just a shell of himself, but that there is still a bit of passion behind his eyes.

The bath has filled before you’ve finished his face, but it’s only a few more moments before you’re setting the blade aside, then taking his smooth face in your hands to wipe away the remaining foam with a soft rag. It’s quite comforting how easily he has given in. He rests his cheeks in your hands like he needs it to live, lets you pet his face and push his hair out of his eyes with the rag until his face is dewy and his hairline is wet.

Gosh, how you wish you had the words to describe how reassuring it is to be able to care for him like this.

“Would you like bubbles?” You ask, stepping away from him and reaching for the liquid soap that’s bottled beside the other washing necessities.

“Um… sure,” Eren hesitates. 

He has to get in now. He has to shed his clothes and bare his skin for you to look over the details of his body. He has to let you see every part of him, from his stomach to his thighs to his behind and his hips. He shivers, but he’s more than warm.

You’ve screwed the cap off of the glass bottle and turned away from him to pour it into the bath, watching it disappear within the hot water before leaning over the side of the tub to dip your hand in and swish it around to encourage it to bubble. The water feels nice against your fingers, and the soap smells fresh to your nose. You wish you could have a bath for yourself, but that has to wait until Eren has finished.

You go to return the bottle to the side table, Eren still ducked out of your eye-line, but when you straighten out and face him again, you’re startled by his state. He’s shed everything to the floor, piling it beside the door, and he stands absolutely naked before you. There’s a brief moment where your eyes pass over the lean planes of his chest and the curves of his thighs and the intimacy between his hips—and you hope the temporary stare could pass as a buffering in your head.

But it doesn’t pass, because Eren notices how your fingers grip and strain around the glass bottle, and how you bite at your lip and squeeze your eyes shut as he slips beside you to slide under the covering of the bubbles, and how you stand facing away from him even moments after you’ve heard the sloshing of the water settle around his body.

He knows you saw him, he knows you looked. 

And you’re scared to turn back around even after you’ve returned the soap to the side, but your hesitation helps your situation even less. You give, snatching a washcloth in your hand and turning on your heel to face him once more.

You shouldn’t have.

Before, you looked at this gesture of washing and cleansing him as something spiritual, medicinal, but now your face is warm and your hands shake and Eren’s looking up at you with a flushed chest and neck and you’re almost certain it’s not from the heat of the water.

So now it’s tense, and the air is thick and humid, and you’re about to literally toss in the rag and leave, but he’s speaking again, and you have to step closer to hear him.

“Sorry,” He murmurs, turning his face to the rocking water.

You blink twice before speaking, “No! No. You have to be naked to bathe, right?” You force a smile before slipping the stool out from beneath the sink and then sitting yourself atop it beside the bath. And then you roll up your sleeves and dunk the cloth beneath the water, letting it soak and sud, before pulling it out and starting with his shoulders.

He sits up willingly, neck and chest out of the water, thick droplets streaking down his tan chest and back as water slips down his body and back into the tub. His hair webs at his shoulders, coming together in dense pointy strands as it waits to be wet in its entirety. You can feel him inhale deeply as your wash cloth passes over the backs of his shoulders; with relief or satisfaction, you’re not sure.

His back has gotten much stronger, and his shoulders have broadened and rounded out with muscle, his knees poke out of the water in center-tub from his height and you refrain from pointing out the fact to preserve his ego just a little bit.

With him now facing away from you, you let yourself settle from the shock that was his nudity. You can still feel the heat on your neck and cheeks, and every time you blink you see his built figure flashing on the backs of your eyes. He stood there in nothingness, only a strong chest and thick thighs and long hair that you wanted to reach out and touch. And he’s still naked before you, only hidden beneath the foam at the surface of the water; the foam that will dissipate as time goes on.

You realize you’ll have to spare a glance again when he has to get out, but you aren’t the only one that dreads the thought. Eren already struggles against the feeling of your lithe fingers pressing against his skin, swiping over his body, feeling over him. The touch is nice, but it’s the tenderness of it all, the intimacy and the doting, that has him biting at the inside of his cheek to thwart the swirling in his stomach.

Who’s to blame him? The person he’s yearned for since meeting is feeling over his body so gently that it makes him dizzy. He wishes that it could be the same under different circumstances, and instead of cleaning blood and dirt from the surface, you were painting yourself on it; lacing your fingers into his hair rather than cleansing it, your tongue licking along his thighs and not rags.

Maybe if he hadn't left, it could’ve been the way he wanted. Maybe if he had stayed with you instead of abandoning you in such haste, you would have loved him enough to be cherishing this bath with him in a home you share together and not sitting here in thick and tense silence and waiting for the other to ask what will become of us.

He knew you had loved him once; the specific time, he wasn’t so sure, but he could remember that there had been a certain softness in your eyes when you looked at him, and he knew that he looked back the same. There’s a deep twisting in his chest at the thought of it being no more, but he’s too scared to ask if it isn’t, and too nervous to ask if it is.

When you pass the cloth over his chest, you can feel the deep rhythmic thumping of his strong heart against his ribs. Even though the dense muscles of his chest subdue the nervous pattering, you can still feel it there beneath your palm. It brings the slightest of comfort to know his body is as highly strung as yours, but it also runs you tighter along the edge. 

Eren leaned back once more, his back resting against the edge of the bath, arms still pulled tightly to his body as if he was cold. Now the only thing untouched by the soap of the cloth is the warmth between his thighs. If it was anyone else, you would have gone through with it, cool, calculated, strategic, purely medicinal, but this was Eren. The thought of reaching between his legs to gently cleanse the most intimate corners of his body had your face burning up.

“Do you want me to… um,” You retract your hand from the water, now slightly clouded with blood and dirt. Eren looks to you in question, unsure of what you’re asking, but as your eyes flit to beneath the water, he knows. “Or you could! I don’t- I don’t mind either way I just don’t want you to freak or anything…”

“I can.” He says, “Could I have a clean washcloth?”

You nod, sighing in relief, and get him another towel. Neither of you would be ever more thankful for your hesitance. You can now turn away from him, take your eyes off his body, and calm your own, and he can try and rid or at least hide the swelling of his cock beneath the water.

It’s awkward when listening to the slight sloshing of water that confirms he’s doing as he said, you can’t help but squeeze your eyes shut in hopes that it would block out the sound. But he’s done fast, sensing your embarrassment, and is pulling the plug at the base of the bath to let the water rush out and down the drain.

And then you’re turning to the noise, a subconscious reaction, trying to see what he’s done while your back was towards him. He doesn’t have the time to reach for the towels or linens that rest beside you to properly cover himself, and he can’t get out a, “don’t turn around yet” before you already have. So the situation is similar to before, when you had stood between him and the bath, but there are three things that you can list off in your head that make the type of tension drastically different.

One; you’re now between him and the door, two; he’s now clean, the blood and dirt that littered his body now swirls down the drain in cloudy water, and three; he’s hard.

“Eren…” You whisper, just above a breath, letting him know that you can see what he feels.

“Yeah.” He says in a disappointed confirmation, like his erection was the last thing he wanted to address; probably because it was.

You had offered him your kindness and your care, you had pushed late feelings aside and looked at him with gentle eyes, and then he and his body had betrayed you. He abused your kindness for satisfaction, misunderstood your generosity for advancements, and now he stands before you with arousal coursing through his veins and he can’t even bring himself to turn away from you. Because the way you’re looking at him with parted lips and weak legs makes everything so much worse.

“You’re—um…” You choke, lashes fluttering and fingers shaky as you half-heartedly point in reference.

“Yeah.” He repeats, but he steps closer to you, reaching for a towel, pushing into your space, looking down on you as he takes it and wraps it around his lower half. But it doesn’t help conceal what you already know, because there’s still a bulge pressing against the fabric of the towel, and his chest is still flushed a blotchy red. 

Nothing you’re thinking could possibly be the right thing to say to him at this moment. You should tell him to get dressed, to fix himself and then leave the room, but that’s damn near the exact opposite of what you want. How do you tell him that your heart is pounding faster than your breathing can keep up with, and that your tongue is heavy in your mouth at the sight of water dripping through the valleys of his chest and abdomen? How do you tell him that you’ve been in love with him for years and this is about to send you over the edge?

“I—um—I haven’t seen you in a while and I just,” He pauses, exhaling deeply, “God, I missed you.”

You don’t move.

“... and you’re doing this for me even- even after everything and I feel disgusting because I… I can’t stop.

All these years and I’ve never been able to stop. And this just… this was the end of the line for me. I thought I’d never come back and then I did and you’re here and you’re fucking touching me like that and I couldn’t stop, I’m sorry.”

He keeps his head low when he reaches for the linens he’s to dress in; not wanting to crowd you or make you uncomfortable. He needs to make it clear to you that he didn’t mean for it to happen like this, that this was just a bath, and that he must get dressed now.

You let him, but not without subjecting him to the heat of your gaze. He feels the laser of your eyes burn across his thighs, his torso, his chest, his pelvis, as he dresses himself, pulling soft briefs over his hips, then loose drawstring pants up his legs, and a cotton long sleeve with quarter-down buttons over his head.

You stare with blank eyes, almost aimlessly, but you know where your eyes are trained to. You follow him the same, like you’re wandering and looking for a place to go, although you know where you’re going and you know who you’re following. You just stand there, watching him as he returns to his bed and combs his fingers through his knotted hair, waiting for him to say more.

But he doesn’t add anything onto his confession. He only lays back onto the wall the bed sits against, with his knees bent up and his forearms resting atop them. He clasps his hands together as he stares absently forward, sitting silent as he pretends you’re not there.

But you make it so hard for him. You’ve followed him around like a lost puppy, and you’re climbing onto the bed and towards him in the same way, and then you’re licking at his lips and searching for the bone of his teeth.

There’s no moment where he doesn’t do the same, no moment where he had to take a second to register just exactly what you were doing. After you had pushed his hands off his knees, then pushed his knees apart and crawled forward until your face was in his, he was already meeting you there and pressing his lips to yours. There was no hesitation; it was like he knew what you were doing and why, and was only waiting for it to happen. 

Perhaps it was you who was startled, because he immediately notices the shallowness of your breathing and the weakness in your body; he can feel the shaky inhale that you breathe in against his lips. You wanted it, but you were nowhere near ready. Nothing could have prepared you for the bursting that took place in the depths of your chest, nor the buzzing of your brain or the laxity in your lips. You weren’t expecting such intensity behind such gentleness; and you never understood the meaning of the word ‘passion’ until then.

Eren has already sat upwards from his lean into the wall, and is reaching for you as you did him. As your hands fall from his face to his neck in the security that he’s not going anywhere, he takes your jaw in his palms instead and sits up on his knees to get the higher ground. You mold so easily under his touch, under his build, and let him pull your face up to his and cover his mouth over yours like he’s trying to breathe in the air from your lungs. 

With his height already bending your neck all the way back, Eren shifts his palms until he can crane it back a little more, just enough to speak into the space between your lips. Your fingers ache from the grip you have on his shirt to keep yourself from falling back, and the back of your head knocks against the tops of your shoulder, but the throb between your legs is what distracts you the most after Eren murmurs, “I need you so bad, so fucking bad.”

There’s a whine that bubbles up your throat, only barely making its way through your mouth to land against his lips, but it reaches Eren’s ears and sends a spark of incentive through his veins.

“But I miss you,” His voice crackles, and he nudges his nose against yours, “I miss you so much more.” 

His forehead falls to yours, pressing against you until it hurts, and your cheeks ache under the palms of his hands as he squeezes you like he’s afraid you’ll fall away. But although you know it hurts, it simply doesn’t at the same time; because all you can think about is that he’s holding you so close to him that you can feel his lips brush yours, and the water from his hair falls in droplets onto your shoulders, and you can smell the mint on his breath.

You speak against the palms that squish your cheeks as tears begin to gather on your lower lash line, “You left us.”

Eren winces, eyes squeezing shut and brows furrowing together. He has nothing to say that will protect him from the pain that is the truth; nothing to justify the ends to his means. He did leave. He left you all in the cold, not knowing when you’d see him again. He abandoned you, in a sense both physical and spiritual.

“I know, I know,” He pushes his forehead into yours hard as his voice strains as if a weight sits on his chest. There’s a lump in his throat that he can’t swallow down without a choking sound escaping, and when it does, there’s a shaking inhale that follows.

And you didn’t want to say what you said next; because Eren was already fighting back tears of guilt, but you do because he must know. He must hurt a little more before you grant him forgiveness.

“You left me.”

He trembles, sucking in air through his teeth and squeezing his eyes so tight that the backs of them swirl. He wants to cry, God he wants to cry so bad. It feels like he’s being ripped to shreds from the inside out, having his heart torn from his chest, having his lungs crushed until they pop.

Regret.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” He says, talking too fast, too loose, emotion seeping from his voice, “I don’t—I don’t even—fuck, I can’t. I’m so, so sorry.”

Gentle tears slip from his eyes and fall from his cheeks and onto yours, wetting your face even more, mixing with drops of your own to gather at your jaw and slick down your neck.

“You… you can’t again—not again. You gotta stay,” You fist your hands tighter into the fabric of his shirt, tugging him forward until you’re embracing once more; his chin hooked over your shoulder and his palms cradling your head and neck as if you were a child.

His body is ablaze from the heat of emotion; his skin is tacky with an anxious sweat and his linens cling to his back and chest. To the touch, he’s feverish, but it feels so nice to be comforted and wrapped in something so warm—so alive—that you can’t seem to care about the heat  gathering at the back of your neck.

“I love you Eren, oh God, I love you,” And it’s not the first time you’ve uttered those three words, but it is the first where you’ve meant it the way you did. 

Eren must know; his hands claw at your back and he digs his face further into the side of your neck, he squeezes you so hard that all the air in your lungs is pushed out in a broken sob. He’s grasping and tugging and then pushing and pulling at you until he’s facing you again and can kiss you with tears on his lips and a gasp in his mouth.

It’s messy, and not in a way that’s particularly erotic or obscene. It’s raw, and fervent, and so full of need that you can taste it on his tongue. He kisses you like he’s trying to steal your soul from your body; he kisses you like it’s his only chance.

It’s more than overwhelming; the tug of his hands that pull your hips to his, the scraping of his teeth against your lips, the panting into your mouth, the towering of him over you. You’re struggling to keep up, but you don’t dare fall short for his sake more than yours. You must let him know that his desperation is reciprocated, scared that he’ll give up if you don’t. 

So you tangle your fingers into his damp hair and push on his chest until he’s falling aside to rest his head on the pillow that isn’t his. Your lips don’t even part as you fall atop him, his waist slotting your thighs and his chest against yours. He willingly accepts his part beneath you, his hands finding your thighs, and his back sinking into the mattress. But he squirms; his hips are restless, his head lifts up to meet your mouth, his fingers dig into the meat of your legs. He’s desperate and it shows. He’s desperate and you feel it pressing into the bend of your thigh and throbbing for your center.

It draws a gasp out of you that allows his tongue to slip between your lips and soothe against your own, and the taste of him spreads over your palate like sweet jam over toast. It’s intoxicating; like he had placed the most addicting of drugs along his teeth and gums before letting you taste the flesh of his mouth. 

You sink further into his body with a sigh, letting your body rest flush with his until the bones of his hips dig into your backside and the seam of his pants is pressing into the seam of yours. The hard of him meets the soft of you and shaking whines are traded once more between your lips. It sends a soft wave of pleasure up through the center of your stomach and warmth that spreads through your head and lulls your thoughts to nothingness.

Eren, Eren, Eren spreads so warm over your brain that you believe the heat has melted it into a puddle at the base of your skull. He makes your tongue heavy in your mouth and your swallows so thick that saliva pools at the floor of it like slick does in your panties. Everything from your head to your toes is so smooth and liquid and warm that you’re nearly molten.

“Every day… every day I thought of you,” He says, nothing more than a whisper, “every single day.” A breathless truth.

His fingers would trace along the smudging charcoal lines that adorned that small piece of parchment that he slipped between the slats of the bed frame above him in his bunk. Laying on that thin mattress with scratchy sheets in the dead of night, surrounded by soldiers, but so alone; whether his fingers were skimming along the paper, wiping at the tears on his lashes, or wrapping around the heat of himself, it was you, every day, on his mind.

You have nothing to respond with other than a softer kiss; a gentle touch of your lips that tells him you did the same.

His hands slip beneath the band of your pants at the base of your spine, fingers reaching and grabbing at the weight of your ass until he can rock you atop him with the leverage he has. He pulls hard and pushes harder, until the bed knocks softly against the wall—testing it, testing you, testing himself.

He fails miserably. His stomach twists and turns at the sensation of your cunt dragging over the length of him, and then it lurches at the soft sighs that you breathe into him, and then he groans and whines because he’s not strong enough to compose himself when you’re both like this. He’s not a strong enough man to stay quiet enough, careful enough, to save himself from the embarrassment of need. He hopes the others will leave the home, at least for a moment, so they aren’t witnesses of his desperation.

As the nerves of your clit bump over the ridges of his cock, you fall limp in his arms with the pleasure that shocks through you. Your chest collapses onto his and your face tucks into the space beneath his ear while your arms snake beneath his head and cradle his neck for support. He still pulls you over him, but he pushes his hips up against you to regain what your positioning had lost. 

“Ah—shit, Eren,” You gasp as he repeatedly nudges against you, making sure to grind into the soft of your pussy when he’s pushed as tight against you as possible.

Your lips brush along his jugular and your words fan out and scatter over his skin to bury underneath as goosebumps. He twitches in the confines of his briefs, feeling himself slick on the fabric as it rubs against the sensitive flesh; he puts more pressure behind the rutting of his hips to encourage another string of breathy expletives to escape your lips.

Your clothing has yet to come off, but you feel your insides wind together as if it has—as if you were naked atop him and he was beneath you, dressed in only your flesh, and swathed in the warmth of your cunt. 

The thought of it makes you tremble: Eren, buried deep inside your body with his own, giving you everything he has while you take it all and give it back. It’s haunted your brain far longer than it should have; the idea of claiming each other in a way so intimate that it makes you dizzy. You need it more than either of you know.

“I want you, I want more.” You admit breathlessly into the crook of his neck. 

His fingers tighten and dig deeper into the soft flesh of your body, “Yeah, yeah, can we—do you want to? We don’t have—God—we don’t…”

“Yeah,” You nod, kissing his skin, “I want to. I want to be with you.”

Eren groans softly, squeezing his eyes tight as the confession seeps deep inside him. The idea scared him when he was younger; knowing his fate, his funeral playing over and over inside his brain. He would never wish that burden on anyone because he knows how heavy loss can be. But now that you’re here and you’re telling him this, in spite of knowing his future or lack thereof, it’s becoming far too hard for him to resist.

Having you like this, finally, after only being able to succumb to the idea in the safety of his thoughts, makes him cave.

“I am yours,” He whispers, like he’s scared to say it.

It pulls you back from him, sits you upright in his lap with your hands beside his head and your eyes wide and brows furrowed. That scares him; makes his blood run cold and he jerks upright like he’s been dunked in an ice bath. You stare at him, right into the darkest and deepest parts of his eyes.

“You’re mine.” You murmur, your hands sliding from his shoulders to the base of his neck, “Mine.”

“Yeah,” He nods slowly, carefully.

You take the back of his neck and pull him forward until your lips are together once more. He sat fully upright, with you still in his lap and legs around his hips. You kiss him harder, deeper, and he grabs your waist so tight just to try and stay grounded. He moans, soft and sweet, when your center grinds into him and your tongue dips into his mouth. 

You want to hear more from him. You want to break him apart into a million pieces and then glue him back together with yourself to make him whole again. To him, you were already doing it. The jerking of your hips and the sliding of your hands drives him crazy; and when your fingers slip beneath his shirt and to his waist, he finds himself unable to kiss back.

“I want to touch you,” You whisper against him, shifting around in your seat until your legs are brought beneath you and you’re knelt on the mattress between his thighs. 

His pelvis tilts up into the touch of your fingers and he grinds his molars together to stifle back the most pathetic of moans. Just the idea of it has him throbbing beneath his seams and desire pooling low in his stomach.

“Okay… okay, shit,” He swallows, leaning back onto the heels of his hands as you curl your fingers over the band of his pants. He uses the leverage to lift himself up from the mattress to let you slip the fabric just below his hips.

Neither of you have taken the chance to look where the heat of him rests between your bodies, still looking into the eyes of the other; even as you push the cover of his shirt aside and take him into your hand, you choose to watch each other fall apart at the sensation.

The contact breaks when Eren’s lids flutter shut as your fingers wrap around the bulk of him, closing swiftly enough where you catch only a glimpse of his eyes rolling back into his head; but that’s enough to spur you forward and grip a little tighter.

He chokes down the saliva that pools in his mouth and fists his fingers into the sheets. Your fingers and palms are far softer than he had ever imagined; despite the callous and scars that have formed from ODM usage, your touch is so gentle and tender that it has goosebumps scattering over his body. It doesn’t help that he’s far more sensitive than expected either, but he should have known that he’s been desensitized to his own hand over his teenage years, not yours. The touch of someone else, let alone yours, is enough to have his balls tightening to his body.

“Oh God,” He groans tightly, hips twitching and jerking into your touch. 

You finally cave into the desire to look at where he rests between your fingers. The head and shaft push through the fist you’ve formed around him and his arousal leaks down both and slips over your fingers. It’s slick, and hot, and it gives you such a helpful slip as you gently pump your hand over him. 

“You’re so… it’s so wet,” You breathe, shifting closer, rising onto your knees.

“Yeah, ‘need you… so—ah—bad,” He grits, interrupted by you straddling his thighs once more and leaning over your hold on him to suck the skin of his neck between your teeth, “God, God—”

You can feel him leak over your fingers again, and his body jerks underneath yours to fuck into your fist. He groans, whines, keens into your touch until you have to cover his mouth with your lips to keep the others from hearing him fall apart. 

It made you drip—drip to the point where you can’t even tease him for how wet he is because you are so much worse. You were grinding your hips into the open space between your bodies, trying not to drop your weight down onto where your hand holds him, and you brace your palm beside his head and your arm shakes and shivers under your own weight.

You lean down and press a kiss to his open mouth to swallow the groans that spill from his throat. He kisses back after a moment of trying to compose himself and slips his tongue past your teeth to slide over your own. It sends pleasure rippling through your bodies to collect at your centers only to shoot back up through your throats for you to whine onto the other’s tongue.

And it feels so good to be able to taste his pleas and cries right from the source. They make you want to taste the tangible pleasure he feels as well—the slick that leaked onto your palms; you want it on your tongue, you want it from the source.

“I… Eren, I want to put you in my mouth,” You murmur weakly, the mere thought of it sending off flares in your stomach.

He pulses under your fingertips and kicks against your palm, “You… you want to—with my—”

“Yes.” You nod, lips brushing against his, foreheads pressed together.

“Oh my God,” He whispers, “Okay, okay.”

He lets you slip from his lips to his neck, then to his collar, until you’re pushing his shirt up the plane of his stomach and he’s tearing it over his head and tossing it aside. You replace the cover of clothing with the cover of your hands and lips; feeling the skin of his torso all flushed and hot and strong under your palms, tasting his flesh, breathing in his scent.

Your thoughts are hot and hazy and your vision is foggy and blurred as you slide low enough where Eren can feel the little puffs of your breaths on the head of him. You can barely make out the sight of him through the lust clouding your vision, but you use your hand to slowly guide him onto your tongue.

You taste it; organic, salty, and so slippery on your tastebuds. The evidence of his arousal, the tangible pleasure, leaks from him and onto you as you lathe your tongue along the silky skin of his tip. It makes you moan; it makes your lashes flutter shut and your core tighten.

It makes Eren curse.

“Fuck,” He speaks through his teeth, “Oh, fuck.”

It’s quite satisfying to hear him like this. Someone who always speaks with unmatched intensity and ferocity having his voice reduced to weak moans and punctured gasps. It scratches an itch in your brain to be able to hear the changes in his pleasure; the loud gasp when you sink your mouth lower, the rumbling groan that reverberates through his chest when your tongue pets against the underside.

And then he drawls your name, all low and husky, when you pull in your cheeks and suck. You whine softly into the space between your lips and him, letting it vibrate around his girth, letting him hear your needy plea.

He’s just a bit too thick to sit in your mouth comfortably; he prods at your gagging reflex, pushes your jaw wide, makes your throat scratchy. You’re slobbering all over him from the intrusion, an embarrassing amount that leaks past your lips and drips down the length of his shaft to pool at his pelvis and seep down his balls. You push as deep as you can to suck the spit back up and over him.

He doesn’t last too long after that. The buzzing and coiling heat in his stomach has become all too familiar all too fast. If he let you continue much longer, he’d be spilling in your mouth instead of your cunt, and the opportunity would be swiped out from under his feet.

“Wait- wait—oh god—you gotta stop or I’m not—I’ll cum.” He jerks around under your weight, thighs flexing, arms twitching, holding himself back from spilling over your fingers embarrassingly early.

You pull away and let him smack against his own stomach, leaking onto the linen of his shirt, and the underside of him throbs from lingering thoughts. He breathes audibly and heavily, chest heaving beneath his shirt and body coming down from where you brought him. 

Moments later he’s tearing his shirt over his head and pushing you down onto the other side of the bed. High on adrenaline, he’s determined to please you how you had to him. He digs his fingers beneath your waistband and tugs hard; until you gasp at the sound of stitches popping as your garments are pulled off completely.

“Eren—”

“Can I? I need to. Just once— just once, please.” He begs, hands clasping around your ankles.

If you weren’t so aware of your lack of time with him, and if you were so aware of his future, maybe you would have said no. Because the idea of his tongue on you in that way was so foreign and taboo; something you only read about in dark romance novels, something that was scrutinized, something disgusting. But Eren is here begging, with wide eyes and red cheeks, if he could sink his tongue into you and drink from your source.

So you say, “Please,” with your brows furrowed like you’ll begin to cry if he doesn’t.

But he does. Eren lurches forward to lay on his stomach, wraps his arms under your knees and around the outside of your thighs, and brings his face in so close to your center that he can feel the heat of you and you can feel the breaths of his pants. 

His eyes shut and he noses at your clothed mound, breathing heavily like it’s taking him everything he has to not devour you. He can feel the wet of your arousal through the thin fabric as he brushes the tip of his nose through you to reach your clit. You smell warm, sweet; you smell like something that will quench his thirst.

He digs his fingers into the tops of your thighs as he licks wetly at the plush of your cunt. His tongue is featherlight, his touch no more than a pet, but the sensation makes you shiver and moan. You’re sensitive, only accustomed to the desperate and rough rubs of your inexperienced fingers, and not the gentle lathing of a tongue. You’re sensitive, only accustomed to being alone, and not with a partner.

You’ve known Eren long enough to know that he’s also used to his own company when experiencing this kind of pleasure. Somehow that makes this far more erotic. He’s never had someone touch him like that, never shoved his face between a pair of thighs, but he still does so with enthusiasm. He’s not trying to cover his inexperience, but rather he simply doesn’t care.

Eren doesn’t care that he doesn’t know what the slick of a cunt tastes like, he doesn’t care that there is a possibility that he won’t enjoy it, he doesn’t care that he has absolutely no clue what he’s doing. He takes what he does know, takes what he’s dreamt about, takes your reactions and pleas, and he'll put them all together to figure it out.

He learns that you like when he nips at the crease of your thigh, and you like it when he takes the bud of your clit between his lips, and he knows that you moan when he slips his tongue inside of you, and that you twitch when he flicks it over your crest.

He learns that he likes it. He learns that he likes how you taste and how you feel in his mouth, so slippery and warm. He likes how he makes you moan and how you whisper his name and fuck yourself on his face. He likes teasing himself by grinding his hips into the mattress, he likes suffocating himself by pressing your thighs against his head. 

He likes the idea of you coming from his mouth alone, but not as much as he likes the idea of you doing it around his fingers, not as much as he likes the idea of you doing it around his cock.

With a messy face and swollen lips, Eren pulls himself from your center with a heaving chest, “Do you—can I put a finger inside you? I don’t have to, I just—”

“Mhm,” You nod, lip taken between your teeth and your hips searching for his touch.

He blinks twice, swallows, flits his eyes between you and your heat, then slips his right hand out from under your thigh. With his head rested on your left thigh, and his middle finger flexed away from the rest, Eren brings his finger to your cunt. He slides it slowly through you, feeling your silky skin and soft folds give against his touch, your arousal collecting on his finger, the bud of your clit hard beneath his fingertip.

His jaw slacks with a shaky exhale as he feels your outsides give in when he reaches the lowest part of your pussy. You tense, flutter around his first knuckle, then keen when he keeps pressing in.  The intrusion makes you melt. His finger is so warm, so thick, so strong. It reaches depths you’ve only felt in the most sensual of dreams. It turns your insides mushy and your brain fuzzy. You can’t stop squeezing down on it.

“Eren, oh sh—Eren.” You whimper.

“You’re so… so warm, and- and wet, and so tight, oh God.” He has to shut his eyes, the sight of you stretching around him floods his brain far too fast and he feels himself getting pulled under.

As he slowly pumps his finger into you, your arms have begun to shake, your thighs press on his ears, your breathing has labored, your hips jerk around, and you’re whining and moaning his name like it’s the only word you know. 

You must like this, right? He asks himself, but God can he really be sure? Is he even doing it right?

“Is this good? Does it feel good?” He asks you, pressing his lips to the inner crease of your leg to try and get your attention.

You clumsily sit up and back on your elbows, watching him with heavy eyes. The shift has his finger bumping up against a certain spot inside you that makes heat spill through your stomach and chest. You

“Fuck—yeah,” Your eyes fall shut again as you nod, lip taken between your teeth, “‘s really good.”

Your words make Eren’s vision black and his jaw falls open in a silent groan. He pushes his hips against the sheets in time with the thrusting of his fingers, his mind wandering and substituting his fingers for his dick; what it would be like to thrust himself inside you even deeper than his fingers could reach. He almost makes himself dizzy with it, his head falling into you and his mouth lingering over your pussy once more.

What if I…

You choke out a moan when you feel his tongue slide through you once more, starting where his finger splits you apart and licking all the way up to your clit. He hums in content when your insides squeeze down real tight on his knuckles, vibrations sending sparks up through your chest. He can feel you leak around him, wetting his finger and opening up as he slobbers on your flesh. You’ve relaxed enough to be comfortable if he slides another finger inside.

“‘m gonna put in another one, okay?” He pants, breath hot over your skin.

“Yeah, yeah—’s okay,” You nod aimlessly, head falling back on your shoulders and you take a deep breath in preparation.

Your jaw falls open and your eyes squeeze tight as you feel him stretch you apart just a bit more—just another finger’s width as his ring finger joins his middle. Eren clenches his jaw tightly at the sight of you visibly melting, his heart stammering in his chest, his dick throbbing against the sheets.

“You’re so—God, you’re so…” Eren can’t even find the words to describe it.

“Eren…” You breathe. Warmth spreads all through your body, your blood hot in your veins, pleasure swells deep in your stomach and only keeps growing and growing and growing. You had to let him know that you weren’t going to last much longer, that there’s no way any more heat could gather in your gut without bursting, but you could only get out his name. “Eren.”

“Are you close?” He murmurs against your wet skin, lifting his head in the slightest to rest his eyes on you, “‘you gonna cum?”

You clench down on  his fingers without choice, his sultry rasp shooting straight to your stomach and silencing your voice. You choke and jerk and tremble as your orgasm washes over you in ruthless waves. There’s no point to your strangled, “Eren, I’m cumming” because he can feel you rhythmically pulse around his fingers and leak into his palm. He already knew good and well that you were done for when your heels started digging into his back and your thighs refused to release his head from between your legs.

But Eren doesn’t care. He closes his mouth back over your cunt and hungrily licks at the slick leaking around his fingers; his tongue slides hotly over your folds, thighs, dips low between your legs where you jerk for a moment in worry that he’d lick over your other hole without a thought in the world, but he doesn’t. On any other day, where he wasn’t teetering the edge of his own orgasm and wasn’t worried that you’d be interrupted at any moment, he would have taken that risk for the sake of pleasure. Today, he is far too impatient.

The moment the final wave pushes you to shore, Eren’s climbing up your weak body and slotting his waist between your thighs to kiss at your swollen lips. Even through the final fabrics of his linen pants and briefs, he can feel you soak against his skin and throb against his shaft. With his tongue in your mouth and arms beside your head, Eren cants his pelvis forward until the seam of his pants grinds into the seam of your body. 

You gasp into his mouth, release the sheets from your fists to grab at his biceps instead. The harsh drag of fabric makes you shiver all the way down to your toes. Your body gives into him, and your stomach slides against his toned one as you writhe beneath him. He can slip his arm beneath your back until you have nowhere to go but up against him; and still, he pulls you closer to savor the intimacy.

“I want to… I wanna do this—have this—with you. Only you.” He breathes heavily, resting his forehead against yours. His hair curtains around your faces, closes you in, darkens the world around you until the world before you is only you and him.

And you’re unsure on whether he speaks in reference to the closeness, or what’s to come of it, but you guess it doesn’t really matter. Either way, you feel the same.

“Me too,” You close your eyes, drinking up the feeling of him being so close, “I want to be with you,” You swallow, “Until we can’t, until…”

Until.

In that moment, you’re reminded that you’re in love with someone you can never truly have, at least not in this world. And even if you can take hold of him for a brief moment, wrap your hands around his body, you’ll never be able to sink your nails into his skin and keep him the way you want. Because one day, he’ll be torn away from you, and you’ll have no say in the matter, and nothing you could ever make him stay.

Eren’s eyes sting; tears rise on his waterline, and in spite of his hurried blinking, they still slip over the edge and down his cheeks to gather at his jaw until a bead swells and drips onto your heated face. He sniffs, turns his face to wipe away the wet on his cheeks with his shoulder, and then dips his head to bury himself into your neck.

He hears your uneven breaths, and feels your shaking chest beneath his own. He pulls you tighter, until neither of you can breathe because there’s no room between you two to even do it if you could. 

“I Love You. Oh my God, I Love You,” He murmurs, refusing to raise his voice in fear of it cracking. But he says it like he’ll never get the chance to after now.

He lifts his head until your noses bump and your lips brush, and then he slides his arm out from beneath you only to slip his hand to the back of your head to cradle it and press your forehead against his so hard that your skull aches.

“I am so in Love with You,” He presses harder with every word.

You try to breathe through your silent cries, sucking air into your lungs with shaking gasps. Your lips are slick with spit and tears, but Eren kisses you anyway. You whine and grab at his body, palm at his bare back to bring him closer, and wrap your legs around his waist to pull him down. You wish you could crawl into his skin, bury yourself beneath his ribs and right next to his heart, or you wish he could do the same to you.

He kisses you like he’s trying to—like he’s going to slip down your throat and right into your lungs; with his teeth clattering against yours and his mouth pushing into yours hard enough that your head is forced back onto the mattress.

It’s urgent, then, after you came around his fingers. He’s running a hand up your side to palm at your breast, and fucking his hips into you like he’s already sheathed deep. You let him, and then some; you encourage him with desperate moans and a wandering hand that slips beneath his waistband to grip at the heat of his dick. He’s spilled more precum over himself, and now he’s wet to the touch under your palms. He pushes his hips hard, trapping your hand between your bodies, thrusting into the hole you’ve made of your fingers. He dizzies himself as he pulls away from your lips, looking into your heavy eyes as he presses into your fist—your fist that sits almost directly into position with your cunt—so his brain tricks him that the deed has already been done.

“Oh fuck, fuck,” His head falls back to your shoulder, mouth beside your ear, voice raspy as he pleads, “‘need you. ‘need you, please.”

You bring your free hand up to pet his hair, still damp from his shower, but now warm from exertion, “Okay, okay, get- get these off,” You pant, trying to push his pants down his thighs.

You both sit up, grasping and tugging and tearing off the remaining clothing on your bodies. Your arms get twisted together, and limbs get stuck in fabric as you try to do too much at once in the heat of your desperation. But after a few torn stitches and clothes discarded to the floor, you’re back to kneeling before each other, equal on his bed.

And then he sees it. He sees it resting between your breasts, atop your heaving sternum, still dangling off of that worn thread. He bets to himself that the heat of your skin has warmed the metal to the touch—that if he took it between his fingers, between his teeth, it would be warm against his skin, his tongue.

He decides to not make a deal of it, despite how the realization makes his dick twitch—

You had that tied around your neck, all while I was gone. While I was countless miles away, I still had a claim around you, I was tied around your throat and resting beside your heart.

—and he’s back on top of you, kissing you breathless, with his dick slotted between your thighs, rutting between the creases of your cunt.

His body is so warm; it always has been. He’s always woken up in the middle of the night with the sweats, always has run a temperature despite being healthy, has scared his mother half to death when he spiked over 104 degrees when truly falling ill. You’ve heard all this, felt the warmth when you’ve embraced him, flushed hot all over when laying beside him, but now that your bodies are pressed together with nothing dulling the heat of his flesh, you feel feverish.

He grinds slowly, sliding his head along your clit, his base pressed against your entrance. He kisses you softly, trying to ground himself before he asks you if he can press inside. The feel of your folds is mind numbing, so slick and smooth and hot, he needs to prepare before feeling you in full. 

“Do you want me inside you?” He rasps, still unprepared, but worried he wont get the chance to fuck you if he waits much longer. If he’s going to spill early, he’d much rather have it inside than out.

“Yes. Yes, please. Just- just go slow, please go slow. I haven’t—”

“Me too—I will. I won’t hurt you, I promise,” He nudges the side of your nose with his own, and then shifts his weight to the forearm beside your head while the other slips between your bodies. He takes himself in his hand, hot and heavy, hard and slick, and pumps his fist over his shaft once, twice.

“I’m- I’m gonna put it in, okay?” He asks, eyes opening to glance up and then between you as he tucks his chin to his chest. 

“Yeah.”

He watches carefully as he steadies his head at the yielding entrance of your body; breathing heavily as the slit on his tip meets with the slit between your thighs. Knowing that he’s going to reach somewhere inside you that no one has before, and that you’re going to make him feel things he’s only experienced in his dreams, drives him almost mad. But then he’s guiding himself inward, his waist closing in on yours, his body invading your insides, and he’s sane again.

There’s little resistance, but it is solved by the slightest tilt in his angle, and then he’s sliding in easily—slow, so slow, but easy. There’s an ache, and a burn when he loses focus and slips too much inside at once, but also a dull throb of pleasure that pulses in your clit with every centimeter that’s pushed inside you. 

You hum against your bottom lip that’s bitten between your teeth, groaning in both the pain and the pleasure that comes with your insides being pushed aside as he makes himself room. It feels good. It hurts for now, but it feels good—it makes you wet.

“Ah sh—oh my God,” Eren’s hand is pulled from between you to support him back up beside your head. The pleasure sparking through his body is enough to make him weak in the arms and heavy in the chest. His biceps tremble, and his palms turn down into the sheets to grip them between his fingers. 

You feel like silk—wet, hot, silk—wrapped snugly around him, hugging him tight, drawing him in deeper and deeper. And your body is blazing and hot under his; you squirm and shake and dig your nails into his back and your heels into the dimples of his waist. Every single one of his senses are flickering haywire, but he can’t seem to get enough of it. 

When he’s at his deepest, with his hip bones digging into the back of your thighs, and his balls smushed against your backside, he still wants to be deeper. He wants to bury himself inside you, plant himself in your depths, grow into your stomach cavity, just so he could be with you for the rest of his existence. 

“Eren, Eren—” You wince, a hand shooting down to push against his stomach, for the tip of him has nudged against something inside you that made you want to yelp.

“What- What’s wrong? Do you need me to—are you okay?” He pants, sitting back on his calves, palms on your waist.

“Too deep. It was really deep—hurt,” You grip onto his wrists, “‘don’t pull out, please.”

But he does, only just a little, just enough to take his head away from your cervix. The sharp aching subsides, and only the burning stretch of his width pushing you apart is what remains. You squirm around beneath him, grasping at his stomach as you attempt to relax around him, waiting for it to feel good.

It worries Eren for a little. He can’t stand having to watch you shrivel up in a pain you’ve never experienced before, in a pain he’s directly causing. He’s done it before, and he’d be damned if he’d ever do it again after having you back. 

The gears in his head begin to turn as he attempts to come up with a solution, and then as he nudges your arm aside and sees the way your body clings to him, he decides the space between you isn’t wet enough. He lets his saliva gather beneath his tongue rather than swallowing it, and works it to the front of his mouth until he believes he’s got enough to ease his strokes. Then, tilting his hips back, he spits down to where you’re joined together, and with the space he gave himself with the slight tilt, he can push his spit inside you alongside his dick.

It makes him dizzy when he sees the translucent fluid mix in with your arousal, and it makes him twitch when the fluid collects at where you’re stretched around him because now it’s just a bit too wet and it’s spreading to the crease of your thighs and smearing over his hips.

Then he does it again; a slow exit, followed by a slow thrust, where he can tremble and melt at the sight and feeling of you. And as he does this, your body relaxes, and your hand falls from his hip to feel as he splits you open.

And then it feels good.

“That’s—ah—you can… you—” Your back arches off the mattress, and the back of your head pushes into the sheets. 

He listens to your voiceless plea and covers you with his body once again. His arms by your head, his face in your neck, and he pulls himself out slowly to take in every flutter and ridge inside you that makes him dizzy. Pleasure shoots up through your body and escapes from your mouth in breathy moans that are just whispers in his ear; but he revels in what he can hear.

“Is this—is it good? Are you—oh my God,” His jaw slacks and his arms shake, forcing him down onto his forearms as the sensation of you begins to truly wash over him.

With as much strength as you can muster, you nod your heavy head and whine a soft, “Yeah,” followed by the slinking of your arms around his body to bring yourself closer, “‘s good. You feel so good, Eren.”

“Ah shit, shit. You’re so—you sound so…” He loses more of his words with every gentle thrust, until he forgets to give himself enough rest time in between the sheathing of his cock, and he feels himself climbing up the wall of his orgasm all too fast, “I—oh my God, fuck, wait—”

He retracts completely, reaching to squeeze at the base of his dick, panting into your ear through the grit of his teeth as he holds in his release. You gasp softly at the heat that was stolen from your insides before realizing he’s pulled away from you.

“Are you okay?” He hears you ask, but it’s muffled by the blood rushing in his ears.

He feels himself throb beneath his fingers rhythmically, and holds tight until it slows to a stop. Then he exhales heavily, swallows hard with relief, and positions him back where he needs to be. 

“Yeah I—I just… I was gonna…” He stumbles over his words, forgets his mind when he feels you pulse against his tip, “I was really close.”

“Oh…” Your stomach twists with arousal, “Do you need to stop? We don’t—”

“No, no. I’m—it’s alright. I’m gonna… gonna put it in again, okay?” He closes his eyes and nuzzles his cheek against yours; to soothe both your nerves and his own. 

The soft touch calms your worry for him, and you lean into it, “Yeah.”

He pushes in, slower, smoother; he had learned from the first time, and now he’s determined to do it better, for longer. He focuses on you, waits for a confirmation, something that will tell him You did it right this time, Eren. He waits for the absence of a wince, the lack of a protest, but listens close for a whine or a beg.

He gets what he needs when he’s just more than halfway. When he feels his head nudge against something of just a slightly different texture than the rest of your insides—a little tougher. You whine at the sensation, feeling it warm your center and spread outwards until it makes you weak in the hands and arms.

He slips further inside, but not too deep, not like before, but deep enough where his balls tap against the curve of your ass, and he can feel the heat of your cunt on his inner thighs. He moans softly as he settles inside you, taking in your warmth. Then he rests his arms beside your head, and places his forehead on yours, and kisses you so gently that your chest aches.

Your fingers dig into his middle back as he pulls himself out; just to thrust back inside you with an unmatched tenderness. Relief washes over your bodies and escapes from your mouths by muffled sighs as the distress of separation dissipates to nothingness. 

You had him, and he had you; beneath your palms, across your skin, sheathed into you depths, and claiming places no one has before.  He wasn’t just with you, he wasn’t just beside you, he didn’t just lay with you… Eren was joined with you, his sweat seeping into your pores, his breath filling your lungs, his tongue in your mouth, and his body inside your body. 

It was strange and foreign, but it was so good. It simply felt right. He fit into where you lacked, and you nestled yourself into places he was missing. It was a puzzle with only two pieces; you one, and him the other.

He pushes and pulls gently—nothing more than the easy ebb and flow of ocean waves in the evening, nothing less. You match his movements with your hips, and tilt them up when he comes down to ease him in and pleasure him like he does you. You clutch him tighter when he does, grapple at his back and pull his mouth to yours to swallow him deeper. 

He likes that you do that. He likes what it gives him, and he likes what it says of you. It makes his lips loose, it makes him breathe your name like a prayer. And you answer him with his own name when his voice makes you squeeze around him tight.

“Oh shit,” He whispers, “Fuck, you feel so—so good,” Eren hisses. He begins to climb up that peak again, and this time he doesn’t know if he can stop.

“You too,” You whimper, “You too,” and you reach to feel between your bodies, to split your fingers around him to feel it as he fucks inside.

Eren’s cock throbs, and he drops his head to your collar with a groan, “You’re gonna make me cum. I’m sorry, I’m sorry—fuck.”

“It’s okay,” You breathe, reaching up to place a hand on his head to pet softly in encouragement, “You can cum. ‘want you to cum for me, want you to cum in me.”

Eren chokes on his tongue at the idea, “You… you—I can, I can?” 

You nod, and the idea has wormed its way into Eren’s brain. 

He’s not dumb, his father is a doctor, he knows good and well the consequences—the possibility—that comes with ejaculation in this manner. That was Zeke’s plan, after all; the cycle can’t continue if there isn’t a seed to plant. The endgame was to bring Eldia a life without hate, whether that was through sterilization or genocide was previously undetermined. 

Eren never wanted children. He never wanted to bring someone of his own into this world. But now that you’re here beneath him, giving him that chance, telling him that he can, telling him that he can leave a part of himself with you that you can keep long after he has died, he wants it.

So on his next thrust, his movements falter, and his arms tremble, and he presses himself flush to your body until there is no part of your front that isn’t touching his, and he cums. Eren cums hard—so hard that for a moment he’s lost his vision and is afraid he’s gone unconscious atop of you, but he can still feel his cock kicking and hear your soft whimpering as he fucks you so full that it spills back out.

But then, he’s disappointed that he has lasted such a short time at first, but as his orgasm simmers to a soft fuzzy feeling, he’s far happier that this second time will last longer. 

He pulls out only to push back in, and it takes you by surprise. You were expecting to be finished, you were expecting to lay there with him while his release spills out of you in the afterglow. So when you feel the warmth of his cock get pushed back inside with the undeniable wetness of his orgasm going with it, you tremble and gasp and clutch at the sinew of his arms.

Any resistance from before has disappeared with the lubrication of his orgasm, and instead of pushing him out, you’re sucking him inside and searching for a release of your own while he seeks out his second. 

Eren rises back up from the crook of your neck to set his weight on his palms, giving him the leverage and space to pull out farther and fuck back in harder. It jolts your body up the mattress and bounces the metal key on your neck from between your chest and up over your shoulder. He hits deeper, just grazing that spot that could make you cry but instead punches a moan out of your throat and makes your legs squeeze around his waist. 

His refractory period was unidentifiable. You couldn’t find a single moment where he had softened inside you, not even a little one. He was hard and hot all the way up through the moment he came, and even after, it remained. Maybe it was the physical stamina he had gained through the years of training, or maybe even the healing ability he had gained from his titan. 

In the end, it was neither. Eren doesn’t know how you could ever expect him to go soft when you were splayed out before him with his key around your neck and your body on display. He even decided to sit back on his calves to give himself a better view of your bliss. His eyes, one a bright jade and the other still dulled, map out every curve and dip of your body while he’s given the privilege of having you in his hands. 

He digs his fingers into the soft of your hips to pull your body to his with a strength that pushes the boundary of being human, that burns in his muscles the way it does when he heals. He decides then and there that for the rest of his life, the last four years he has with this burden, he won’t use it for pain again. For as long as he has left with this privilege, this curse, he will only use it for this—to pleasure you, to help you, to give to you.

He fucks you harder this time, not only bringing his hips to yours but yours to his as well. He does it with an unmatched passion, putting all the emotion he’s bottled up from suppressing it through the years behind his every thrust. He makes sure you feel it.

“Eren, Eren—oh my gosh,” You reach out for him, until your fingers can wrap around his wrists at your waist as he holds your hips up to his, “Eren, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Is this… is this still okay? Is it too rough?” He asks between breaths. He picks his gaze up from where he meets you to look over your face.

You meet his eyes with yours before flicking them over his body to admire the splotchy red flush over his chest and up his neck to pool in his cheeks, and the still damp hair that’s been slicked by sweat to his forehead and the nape of his neck, and the bulging of his muscles, and the sparse hair that teases down the center of his navel only to thicken above the hang of his dick.

Your body reacts to the sight of him almost immediately; insides clenching around him and nipples hardening to peaks. You can’t stop your eyes from rolling back and fluttering shut before you get the chance to respond, but you manage to force out a few words before you lose your ability to speak altogether, “Don’t stop.”

He groans deeply, tightening his grip on your hips and slamming them to his, so hard that you can hear the slapping of it through the room. And then he’s sliding his left arm beneath your body to keep you up while his right hand sneaks between your thighs to tease at the pearl of your clit.

Your legs jerk around his body, thighs clamping down on his waist and your feet kicking and sliding down on the sheets. You twitch and writhe and squirm at the sensation that Eren begins to lose grip on your body. His fingers slip and you’re dropped back down onto the mattress, empty and breathless, while Eren quickly tries to find a better way. Your reaction had startled him, and now he was worried he’d done too much.

He’s maneuvering you moments later, grabbing at your sides and pulling you upright with the leverage he has from lying himself down. Your knees land on either side of his thighs while your hands grip his arms to steady yourself. Heat courses through your veins now that you're standing exposed with no actions or pleasure to distract you from the intensity of his gaze.

“I want you to do it,” He pulls gently on your arms, guiding you forward until you’re shifting your legs to brace his hips, “You control it, okay? I want you- want you to make yourself feel good.”

You swallow, resting your hands on his stomach as you hover yourself above his pelvis, “I did feel good.”

“No but—I just… I don’t want to overwhelm you,” He looks away, “or hurt you.”

You furrow your brows, “You weren’t.”

Eren inhales deeply, finding courage in a deep breath, and mutters, “I could have. When- when I see you like that and when I can feel you like that, I just—I can’t control myself.”

His explanation shouldn’t have aroused you the way it did, and it sure shouldn’t have made your body slicken or made your lashes flutter, but it did. The idea of it—Eren losing himself in you, Eren getting lost in you—made your head light. But instead of arguing, you reach between your bodies with gentle fingers to lift his dick, glossy with your arousal and creamy with his release, upright to nudge him against your entrance. 

His blunt nails etch into the skin of your thighs as you ease yourself down onto the length of him; shaky with inexperience and weak with the remnants of pleasure sizzling in your blood. At this angle, he carves out a different path inside you. He feels closer to the surface this way, like the head of him is massaging against your abdominal wall. 

It makes you jerk upright in reaction, but that only worsens the ache in your stomach, so you collapse into his chest to bury your face in his neck and breathe shakily in his ear. Your body trembles and your pussy flutters as you try to adapt to the new positioning. Eren takes quick notice of your change in demeanor, and wraps his arms around your center to rub at your back.

“‘this okay? You okay?” He turns his head to try and catch your face, but you’re hidden too deep beneath his jaw, and he instead rubs the tip of his nose against your cheekbone.

“‘s fine… just different.” Your words are clipped short as he shifts around inside you.

You take inhale deeply, breathing in the scent of sex an Eren, and bring yourself upright. You place your hands on his shoulders and push up slowly, hanging your head down low to eye where you’re joined, until your arms are straight and your chest is before his face. 

“It’s okay though, right?” He asks, words laced with worry, not bothering to glance at the breasts in his face until he knows you’re alright.

You look at him, with hazy eyes and an open mouth. You’re met with hues of gray and green, brows furrowed by concern, the corners of his mouth tilted down in a small frown. You smile lazily, with your lids heavy, and say, “Yeah… it’s perfect.” Then, his face melts from anxiety to relief, and his hold on your back falls to a grip on your hips.

“‘gonna start,” You whisper, “I’m going to move.”

“Okay… okay,” He nods, tightening his abdomen, readying himself for the promised sensation.

You press the heels of your palms into the mattress beside his head, and leverage your hips up and off his pelvis. The pressure in your stomach has settled since his tip has been pulled away from that sensitive spot inside you, but the dragging of his shaft in all of its hard heat makes you sigh and squirm. 

You look between you, watching his length come out shiny with evidence of your pleasure, and throbbing with proof of his. The sight makes you look up to him, like it was something substantial enough that you’d believe he’d have a reaction to it that you want to catch. But Eren’s already looking at you, with his lashline blurred by tears, chest and cheeks flushed, and his hair fanned out beneath his head. 

He looks at you like he’s trying to commit every last inch of you to memory—every last cell of you; so when he lays on his deathbed in four years from now and he doesn’t have enough in him to open his eyes anymore, he can still see you in the black of his lids.

It makes your heart ache in a way you can’t explain. It was some twisted mixture of nostalgia and melancholy and solace, where the proportions of each were so equal that you couldn’t pick one that’s more prominent than the next. 

You lean forward with wet cheeks and red eyes, and you kiss him on the lips with so much passion that it becomes sloppy. “I Love You,” You murmur with a cracked voice, “I Love You.”

He wraps his arms around you again and lets you grind into him as he rocks up into you. He listens to you hiccup and whimper and choke on your tears and moans as your lips are still pressed firmly to his.

There are spit and tears shining on both of your lips as you pull away from him. He gasps deeply, grasping at your body harder, gazes at you with more passion, and rasps out, “I Love You”.

You whine and bury your face into the heat of his neck, mouthing at the delicate skin as he grinds his hips up into yours and makes up for the movement you have lacked to make. You gulp and sob against his flesh as pleasure and emotion overwhelm you. He’s punching every single breath out of you with every single thrust he gives, until you can do nothing but drown in everything you’re feeling.

You cum like that. His arms wrapped around you, palms splayed over your back. Your chest and stomach flush to his chest and stomach, your tears mixing with his sweat and your saliva. 

The room goes quiet aside from your shallow and desperate panting. And maybe, just maybe, you think you can hear your heartbeats thumping in tandem; his relaxing as your’s contracts, your’s relaxing as his contracts. Together, but not in sync.

***

Author's Note: i wrote this over the span of one entire year. its poorly edited, and some parts dont make sense. perhaps its the best piece of literature i could ever write. perhaps its the worst. perhaps i'm just happy to write. and that is enough.

©2020-2023 JUNISFICS All Rights Reserved

[kateybuggi]

Guys if I knew ANYTHING about reglious symbolism, it would be OVER for yall

DUDE DUDE LEMME JUST YAP FOR A LITTLE BIT

I love Sunday and Robin, their story, specifically Sundays is so tragic, his twisted way of thinking that was implanted in him from childhood

He just wants to make everyone safe and happy!!

Sure the way he goes about it are quite fucked up, but he had good intentions, and I love a villain who’s mindset is so twisted their good intentions turn out bad

He’s such a well written character, and I want to do an analysis of him and his design so bad, but I don’t think I’d be able to do them justice

I know very little about the Bible, and any religious symbols around that, other than just the biblically accurate angel memes, and whatever loose stories I’ve picked up over the years

His design really reminds me of Angels, the wings being a big thing, but also he has sort of a more gray and white motif, and that feels very like pure

White typically symbolizes purity, and it makes sense that his design is more gray than robins, who’s is more purple and white, both colors that have a positive symbolism, purple being richness and royalty, and white being once again, purity.

Sunday is gray, a mix between the purity of white, and the darkness and evil normally associated with darker blacks and blues, he’s not evil, but he’s also not in the right

Also with the wings, Sundays wings look more jagged, where robins look more soft and rounded

The only thing I know about the religious symbolism, in Sunday and his boss fight, is what’s explicitly said in game.

He wanted everyday to be sunday, funny, that’s also where his name is from, obviously

Sunday is described as the day of rest, and Sunday wanted everyone in Penacony to have 7 days of rest, no worries, never waking up from the sweet dream

He went about it wrong way,

But he had good intentions, and I love that for him

[salemshotspot]

[watching mjf/punk feud for the first time]

Sorry but mjf rubbing punk’s blood over his shirt, over the face of his younger self, telling punk ‘the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist’, screaming he is ‘the devil himself’ I’m begging somebody to talk about the symbolism with me, I’m begging somebody to get objectively biblical about this [I fucking love when trauma manifested in biblical allegories]

[respectthepetty]

Hey Petty! I love reading your colour-analysis posts a lotttt and recently came across your posts about DFF. Started watching it because of you and it's soo good! So, I noticed you're starting to suspect White. But come on, isn't he literally named "White"?! I really don't see him being mixed up in all the drama like the others. My bet's on him being the last girl standing (like many others ig). What's your take on it??

I love color symbolism, but maybe it’s because I played Clue too much as a child, I actually don’t trust anyone in this show. White has proven several times to be as pure and innocent as his name, but . . . is he too good to be true?

The biggest reason I want White to not be so innocent in all of this is because this is traumatizing. If White truly had no idea what he was in for, this boy will need a good therapist and to stay hydrated the rest of his life. So by me thinking something is up with him, it helps me cope with the idea that maybe he isn’t being traumatized, but actually in on the traumatizing.

And then, there are the other reasons:

The Tumblr detectives have stated that White is rich. Possibly richer than Por. He went to a private school, not the ones the boys went to.

Yet Tee tells him that he will treat them to the US to see Jin when he has enough money.

I’m not one to question power dynamics in a relationship, but it’s odd because the OST makes it seem like White approached Tee first, as if Rich Boy White initiated this relationship with older Tee . . . without knowing anything about him.

We still have yet to get backstory on White. He is dating Tee. That’s it! The music video showed us more scenes from them, so how did they end up falling in love in an arcade?

He is resourceful. He plugged in the walkie-talkies. He found the video and a gun. He cries when screamed at. But is he using those tears as another resource? If white women weaponize their tears, why can’t White?

And who does he turn those tears against the most? Tee!

I believed White wasn’t New because I could not imagine Non’s brother actively dating (and fucking) his brother’s bully, but why is White dating Tee? Tee had some people convinced he was a good guy in the first episode, but NOT ME! Once he said that White was being disobedient, I was ready to push him off that terrace, but The Hand got to him first.

As Fluke pointed out, it’s strange White didn’t know about Uncle Joe. It kind of makes sense to not know about family members since even Tee’s friends didn’t really know about the uncle, but this rich boy doesn’t know his boyfriend of over two years had an uncle (regardless of the money laundering) ESPECIALLY because Tee’s ass was always at that gambling hall. Tee openly showed he is not the type to just let his boyfriend be alone, so how did Tee explain not being near White every second of every day?

White wasn’t supposed to be on this trip, but he begged Tee to let him come. Tee apologized for this, but White put on a smile and said all was well. White wants to be with Tee, and he seems to want Tee to be with him, right in the middle of the action.

So either White is a metaphorical angel sent from heaven who can endure even the worst tragedies or he is a biblical angel sent to punish these boys, specifically Tee, for their crimes.

Either way, he is an angel

who will survive!

[captaincrazycreative]

Tmagp 19 stream of consciousness

-okay Sam buddy keep tellin your self that

-CELIA NO STOP IT CELIA DONT ENCOURAGE HIM!! WHY DO YOU WANNA KNOW ABOUT THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE?? HUH CELIA??

-Jesus these two are gonna cause SO many problems

-okay so shout out to the person who said that the characters were named after alchemists you were DEFINATLY onto something

-I know the writers can be bad with names but there's NO WAY sam sharing a name with a famous alchemist was a coincidence

-I want a hamilton style musical about Issac Newton and his shannanigins

-I wonder if this is a "speaking machine" scenario where this is vaguely based off a real, weird, horrifying event from history. Do I even wanna know???

-YES WEIRD PLANT HORROR WHEW HOOOO

-who knew murder plant man would be plot relevant

-YES YES BIBLICAL SYMBOLISM CHRISTIAN IMAGERY BEING USED FOR HORROR IS SO SICK

-yeeessss the unknowable horrors of having knowledge beyond your comprehension!!

-I love weird horror so fucking much. Don't get me wrong I enjoy the Bonzo stuff, but the more abstract phsycological stuff from tma is better imo, So I'm glad it looks like they'll be more of that in the future

-oh good the doggo's okay :)

-okay so if I'm understanding this then the protocol is just...going over to someone's house and burning up their shit??? Here we were expecting something fancy, and It's so brilliantly simple I love it

-man I don't think Alice has ever been this done with Sam before, not judging her for it just pointing it out.

-I'm glad we're more focased on plot then romance these last few episodes. Don't know how unpopular of an opinion this is, but I don't like the love triangle

-THAT BEING SAID I'm so happy to Sam and Alice interacting 😊 even I'd they're only arguing about the horrors and being Dicks to each other I don't care I love them

-COLIN! I legit thought Alice was gonna find his body for a sec

-he's so paranoid, but he's also correct to be paranoid

-OH NO FUCK THAT RECORDING DEVICE SOUNDED CLOSE IVE NEVER BEEN SO TERRIFED BY BEING ABLE TO HEAR SOMEONES VOICE CLEARLY

-so either the computers have been able to hear them this entire time OR Alice inedvertently brought the eye to him

- poor Alice keeps accidently dragging the people she cares about back into the horrors :( hopefully this doesn't lead to a guilt complex later on hahaha

-if our boy Colin wasn't in it before he sure is now oh Colin... :(

In conclusion this episode was SOOOOO fucking good. I've had my problems with the writing, but the last few eps have been REALLY good. I loved the statement, I loved the character interactions I LOVE THE LORE DUMP I feel like we're finally seeing the plot start to take shape and I couldn't be more excited! No real complaints except that the characters were a bit hard to hear in the beginning. I'm so hyped!

[radiosummons]

Even though Wolfwood is very much not an actual Catholic priest, I do find it compelling that Vash--someone without any religious beliefs and minimal exposure to "Christianity," courtesy of Rem (OG Trigun)--is the most faithful of the two.

And by "faithful," I don't mean so much in a religious or Christian sort of sense. More that Vash holds onto his faith that there is good in people and that everyone is worth saving. That the taking of a life is something so unspeakable to him that it will literally cause him immense mental, emotional and physical pain when he is forced to do so. His unshakeable belief, i.e. his faith that every life is precious and no one is beyond redepmtion irregardless of how morally corrupt an individual may be is so foundational to who he is as a character.

While I've only really experienced this through anime and various other Japanese based video games, I do enjoy seeing depictions of Christian iconography and concepts form non-Western creators. I love the art and memes of Vash being a "biblically accurate angel" (even though Plants aren't angels, I am so fucking happy that people are picking up on the unintentional symbolism) and I do enjoy the amount of, again, art and memes of Wolfwood being a cringefail Catholic priest.

But I also love the non-Western depiction of Christianity in Trigun, or rather the apocalyptic remnants of it. Despite the fact I have lost my ability to have faith in a higher being (and my own personal beef/distate with the Catholic Church/conservative Christianity as a whole), I find the worldbuilding of Trigun fascinating in this aspect as it provides its audience an alternative form of a global religion that's very relevant to our daily lives.

In Trigun, Christianity is very much a shadow of its former self, a leftover remnant of humanity--more specifically, a remnant of an old forgotten belief system--that has been essentialy been lost. Save for a few remaining Bibles and some memories of particular Catholic iconography/symbolism.

But overall, that's all that remains. Just familiar symbols and various rituals that some people are able to recall from their former lives.

So the decision to pair Vash up with someone like Wolfwood, someone who has lost his faith in humanity as a whole but has resolved himself to protect those that he can (or rather, deems worthy of saving) ... I find that relationship absolutely fascinating. Because I'd argue that in most Western depictions of a holy man (typically Christian and typically Catholic, let's be real), it's usually the holy man that is doing the saving. Or at the very least, is usually helping guide the other characters on their own paths towards redemption.

Despite the fact Wolfwood isn't an actual priest but instead an assassin trained by a mercenary group using the guise of an old religion (again, that most of humanity has clearly forgotten about), I find it to be a wonderful storywriting choice to make Vash the "holy man."

They're both incredibly tragic characters that burden themselves with crippling destinies. Destinies that ultimately lead to their own destruction, but hopefully all for the greater good. Vash holds faith that maybe, just maybe, he can make Nai realize the error of his ways and turn over a new leaf.

Understandably, Wolfwood finds this way of thinking horribly childish and naive. He even takes it as a personal insult when Vash continues to insist that killing people, even if it's for the sake of protecting someone else, is wrong.

But Vash isn't wrong for wanting to see the good in people. To borrow a quote from Everything Everywhere All At Once: "You tell me it's a cruel world, and we're all running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight."

Granted, Vash doesn't express his beliefs as eloquently as this. But that doesn't really matter, though. Because Wolfwood doesn't need Vash to make express himself this way for Wolfwood to finally understand him. Vash, by the simple of virtue of being himself, is a good person who chooses to see the good in others.

And Wolfwood ... Wolfwood is someone who chooses to see the bad.

Wolfwood cannot quite bring himself to view the world the way Vash does. And Vash will never be able to share Wolfwood's opinions regarding who is worthy of living, either. But they respect each other and understand where the other person is coming from.

It does take Wolfwood a lot longer to understand Vash as a person, let alone his faith in humanity. But when he does, it's so satisfying to watch Vash become someone important to him. Someone that he wants to protects. Because if Vash won't defend himself, Wolfwood resolves to be the one to protect Vash.

Even if Vash doesn't really want that.

It's so fucking amazing to see these two clash over their ideals, whether it's in the form of playful teasing or straight up beating the shit out of each other. But they stay together and hold each other in such high regard despite their conflicting beliefs.

To me, one of the most beautiful aspescts of Trigun is that Wolfwood--a man of faith but only in name--gets to have such a close connection with Vash--a man of faith through and through--and that because of their relationship, they both inspire a existential AND spiritual crisis within one another.

Because in a world that makes no sense, they both find faith in each other. And if that isn't the most beautiful shit you've ever seen, then I don't know what is.